Stage Rave

The constant beat pounds through your temples like a blanketed jackhammer aimed at your skull, while the reverb catches in your chest like a rival heartbeat. You itch to move, but your motions are confined--pushed to your ass firmly pressed in a seat. There's no club, no smoke machines, no laser lights, as this is a serious performance, serious art. Yet still the rave rhythms teasingly assault and fire you.

While the dance world has always relied on a variety of sources to fuel its contorted musings and movement operandi, a growing number of dancers and choreographers are gleaning new rhythms from the Day-Glo land of the raves.

From its dizzying, all-night substance free-for-all roots in the early '90s--the stereotypical dusk-to-dawn music and dance party held in an abandoned warehouse--the rave has quickly become a dance/music world fixture (as well as the favorite "just say no" conservative media punch bag of late). Like most other burgeoning metropoli, Portland plays host to at least a couple of parties every weekend. Promoters like Earthbeat and Renegade Rhythms cater to every trip-hop, jungle-beat whim of their Evian-clutching fans, while clubs like Ohm, Club 1201 and the new eastside electronica behemoth
B Complex serve the elated youngsters and their of-age brethren. Naturally, that includes dancers. "The club scene is interesting to choreographers engaging in kinetic research," says choreographer and PICA head Kristy Edmunds. "A lot of dancers are already in the scene. It's like a cheap form of social entertainment and physical training at the same time."

But while Edmunds agrees that underground dance music has found a receptive audience in professional dancers, incorporating the movement of these trance gatherings has been a rockier transition. After all, why watch the action when you can engage in it?

This difficulty became apparent after viewing Jane Comfort's uneven ode to the streets, Asphalt, last month. Her dancers muddled through repetitious movement that evoked glassy-eyed boredom rather than an ebullient haze of non-stop energy. Somehow the strict attention to specific rave gestures failed to capture, well, any emotional quality for the audience or the performers. Scratch the copycat method. So, now what?

The New York-based choreographer Wally Cardona's company, Wally Cardona Quartet, tackles this do-it-yourself dilemma in its first full-length piece, Trance Territory, this weekend. The work, which has its roots in a two-week residency sponsored by PICA during the company's visit to Portland last year, not only captivates with its bold modern qualities, but manages to convey the intimate circumstance of the rave/club scene itself--all without a single head bob.

Cardona knew that using the club experience as a starting point would be a challenge from the moment he found himself dazed, electrified and still up at 5 am dancing at a rave in New York two years ago. Spending night after night "researching" at dance clubs, including Portland's own Ohm, led Cardona to pinpoint his biggest challenges--rave moves and that pesky notion of the proscenium stage.

Trance Territory defeats those problems by refuting the necessity of "rave" movement as the language of the rave experience. Just as choreographers like Rennie Harris or local funktress Mariecella Devine (whose hip-hop solo performance in OBT's charmed quark a few years back wowed and converted ballet audiences) pushed boundaries in hip-hop by incorporating and melding genres, Cardona conquers the rave block by exploiting the limits of the stage as well as marrying rave standards to his own personal dance style.

Onlookers gaze at Cardona's quartet of performers through the confines of a grid of neon-tape lines that mark the dance space. The force of the music and the strength of the clean, powerful dancing convey the personal connection inherent to raves. But these intense individual explorations suddenly join to form larger dance groupings, though these fragile bonds hold together for only the briefest of moments, crumbling, finally, as the insistent beat draws the dancers back into their own worlds. Throughout, it's that beat that provides the glue: "DJs have become the inexpensive composers of contemporary performance," says Edmunds, who sponsored Cardona's residency. Cardona agrees; his piece is set to a live evolving mix performed nightly by DJ ¢hange.

"That constant sound is what supports you," Cardona told WW by telephone. "Either the boom-boom-boom in the club, or a ceremonial drone, it's this musical monotony that provides a comfort level. It makes it so you can just let go after a while."

Now take a seat and pass me the Evian.

Newmark Theater, Portland Center for the Performing Arts, 1111 SW Broadway,

242-1419. 8 pm Friday-Saturday, May 25-26. $16.

"Cardona devises arresting movement and organizes it suavely in space."--

WWeek 2015