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How you feel about a live dance performance that pairs wine and beer with the movement onstage may depend on your outlook on ingesting mood-altering substances with your art.
Some of us feel looser, more relaxed and open to artistic expression after a few, while others prefer to meet creativity with sobriety. But it should be noted that TriptheDark’s Mausoleum: A Dance & Drink Pairing Event is no Mythbusters-like test to see if your rising blood-alcohol level will turn you into a raging dance critic.
The Milwaukie-based dance company has stated that its new work is a celebration of “the elements of life that were lost due to the pandemic: death of variety, death of stability, death of inhibition, and more.” After all we’ve been through, it’s a safe bet we can all drink to that.
While one might be tempted to joke that a riesling or a fruity IPA pales compared to the gravity of lives lost or the pain of the relationships that suffered from quarantine, TriptheDark has a history of testing boundaries. After all, the company has, with great humor and hip factor, produced shows based on Twin Peaks, the Jim Henson-David Bowie movie Labyrinth, and House of Cards.
Each of the four acts of Mausoleum, which comes from TriptheDark co-creative directors and co-founders Corinn deTorres and Stephanie Seaman-Keith, is accompanied by a short film featuring a sommelier and a cicerone, who describe the tipple you are about to sip. Oh, there are also non-alcoholic offerings, such as virgin mojitos and elderberry kombucha.
After an opening dance, the show dives into a lively pair of pieces titled “Death of Trust” and “Death of Variety,” which are set to music by Garbage and Thom Yorke, respectively, and performed by Seaman-Keith, deTorres, Erin Shannon and Ashley Long.
Subsequent dances “Death of Social Norms” (perfectly set to Björk’s “Human Behaviour”), “Death of Optimism,” “Death of Casual Conversation” and “Death of Sanity” force us to think about how our pre-pandemic daily habits have changed over the past two years (and how 2018 boutique wine from Adega Northwest can go down awfully fast).
Of all the pieces in Mausoleum, dancer, choreographer and winemaker Diana Schultz’s joyful “Death of Inhibition” (set to Childish Gambino’s “Sober”) got the most applause. Yet “Death of Casual Conversation,” choreographed and performed by token dude Kaician Kitko, packs an extra emotional wallop, partly because it’s set to a poem by Natalie Myers-Guzman with lines like “No, I don’t think I’m going to get through this.”
With its myriad motions—pushing, crawling on hands and knees, robotic movements evoking potent feelings of social despair and even jazz hands—Mausoleum flies by. It’s a lot to absorb (you try taking notes while balancing four glasses of wine), but for a performance whose theme is death, the mood is pretty upbeat.
Just ask the audience. I overheard the guy next to me say, “Nothing says joyful loneliness like this IPA.” He later happily proclaimed, definitely getting into the spirit of the evening, “The beer was bitter, like the subtext.”
Even when Mausoleum is over, the cheery vibes remain. Before you know it, the dancers hit the bar for their post-show libations and you are chatting with them while finishing up your last glass—and thinking about the fact that being able to share artistic experiences is worth celebrating.
SEE IT: Mausoleum plays at the Chapel Theatre, 4107 SE Harrison St., Milwaukie, 971-350-9675, tripthedark.com. 7:30 pm Friday-Saturday, April 29-30. $15-$25.