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When people used to ask BodyVox artistic directors Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland if their company performed The Nutcracker, they gagged. They don't have anything against holiday shows—it just depends on the holiday. "So we thought, what would be our holiday that we love?" Roland says. "We went through the list and it was obvious that it had to be Halloween."
Hampton and Roland's passion for spooky splendor drives their new dance film BloodyVox: Lockdown, which is part of a series of BloodyVox shows that began in 2010. It's one of the company's most ambitious works—it was shot at locations across the Portland area, including Forest Park, Lone Fir Cemetery and Sauvie Island, and will be shown as a drive-in movie at Zidell Yards. Those who don't make it to those screenings can also stream the film online.
WW spoke to Hampton and Roland—who are married and appear in Lockdown—about choreographing the film, balancing artistic expression with social distancing, and why parts of the production look like a car commercial (in a good way).
WW: Did you start with the subtitle Lockdown, or was that something that came later in the process?
Ashley Roland: There's a particular piece called "Lockdown" within the evening, and we explore the subject of being in lockdown. And it's sort of a metaphor piece. It's a dream or a nightmare piece about what's happening.
As a company, we had to come together—and like the NBA or some of the major league sports, we had to make a quarantine agreement, even though we couldn't live together and people have other jobs outside of here. We had to make an agreement for our behavior, how we would interact in the community—wearing masks, coming to the studio in clean clothes, bringing fresh water.
Did you try to choreograph so the dancers would stay farther apart?
Jamey Hampton: No. The show was already choreographed, so you'd have had to remake the entire show. It's filled with lifting, and the style of our work is very connected dancing. We knew that in order to do the work, we were going to have to touch each other, lift each other, throw each other around—and we couldn't wear masks the whole time.
How would you characterize the style of the choreography?
Hampton: Our work, we call it contemporary dance. We don't call it modern dancing because nothing is modern anymore. Having sort of made our peace with that moniker, what characterizes our work is several things, all of equal importance: physicality, precision, athleticism, humor, theatricality, mystery, romance, winsomeness.
Roland: Our take on Halloween is not the gory, screeching, stabbing, frightening experience. It's more the absurd.
Hampton: That's the irony—there's no blood in BloodyVox. There is very deep red-colored cupcake frosting, but there's no blood.
What were some of the techniques that cinematographer Robert Uehlin brought to BloodyVox to make sure that it was going to come alive onscreen?
Hampton: He filmed the whole thing in 4K so he could instantly zoom in on an area of the frame or go from slow motion to fast motion and have a dynamic to it that is very engaging for the viewer. It looks like some beautifully done Chrysler commercial in some places.
Roland: [Laughs] No, more like a Porsche. The wonderful thing about going from just filming a dance concert in our theater to going out into the universe is that you can play with distance and angles and shooting through trees and shooting from above and shooting from underneath so much more easily than when you're using a black box. So for us it was just liberating.
Could you talk about any particular things you want audiences to get out of BloodyVox?
Hampton: It has a lot of deep emotionality to it, and a lot of the humor enables the deep emotionality to happen. Everything isn't just heavy and sad all the time, or perplexing. We use humor in a very strategic way, and also it's necessary for us. We have to find humor in things or else we'll just go insane.
SEE IT: BloodyVox: Lockdown screens at the Drive-In at Zidell Yards, 3121 S Moody Ave., bodyvox.com. 7:30 pm Thursday-Friday, Oct. 22-23; 2, 6:30 and 9 pm Saturday, Oct. 24; 6:30 and 9 pm Thursday-Saturday, Oct. 29-31. $35-$55.