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Ten Tiny Dances is anything but tiny.
The show gives ten choreographers one 4-by-4-foot stage and the results are usually mind-blowing. Or at least mind-fucking.
In its 37th iteration, the best part of the show at PICA's Time-Based Art Festival this year was a thin ribbon of blue paint dripping from a suspended cube onto James Healey's pale, naked chest. Or it was how Michelle Ellsworth looked like she was having a seizure from social anxiety while explaining her "post-verbal anti-social network." That wasn't a dance at all. But at one point the audience laughed so loud you couldn't hear Ellsworth's comic chatter. Or it was Wade Madsen changing on a dime from dancing ballet, to the robot, to miming a rocket ship—all while wearing a 1970's plaid suit and red sequin blouse.
If you missed it, you missed out. And that night at The Redd will never come back. But just wait until next year (any maybe not even that long) until Ten Tiny Dances inevitably returns by popular demand with ten more of the weirdest ways to use 16 square feet of plywood stage.
1. UNDER THE TABLE - Dawn Stoppiello, Eric Immel, Katie Buono
The first "dance" is actually a looped video and sound "installation" in an annex at The Redd. You walk under a table suspended maybe twenty feet in the air to see the looped video of Stoppiello's choreography, which she usually creates by hooking dancers up to motion-sensing systems linked to computers. Her collaborators are tech gurus too—Immel is a mechanical engineer for Microsoft and Buono composes music for public sites and The Tank, NYC.
2. UNTITLED (TBA/10 TINY) - Keith Hennessy
When there are no words, there is always glitter...and Beyonce.
3. YOU'VE GOT TO, AT SOME POINT... - Wade Madsen
Seattle's Madsen choreographs for groups at that city's mainstays—Cornish College of the Arts and Velocity Dance—but his solo dance defied time and place. Instead, he created a constantly-shifting soundtrack that jumped genres, decades and styles. And with each change in the music his movement switched to match it.
4. PRESERVATION/WITHOUT A TRACE - Subashini Ganesan
Offering the night's first really intellectual and interpretive work, Ganesan came out with a camelback filled with two lists, two jars, two metronomes, a bottle of water and salt. After dancing with the metronomes, she displayed the identical lists to the packed bleachers in The Redd. "Things to get rid of without a trace" and "things to preserve forever" both included things like "your past relationships," "past sexual experiences," and "what you through five years ago." One list went in each of the jars—labelled "preserve" and "without a trace"—and then she poured in the salt and water, respectively.
5. THE TINA'S - 11:dance co
Feminist commentary took the small stage with this local company's dance, which features three young women in slinky slip dresses being puppeteered by three young men circling the stage. The most interesting moment came when the girls finished their dance and the men escorted them out, clapping. At first the audience joined in, but the applause awkwardly fizzled as patrons realized they were buying into the male domination. Once every 11:dance co dancer disappeared backstage, then the real applause roared.
6. BLUE - James Healey
Undoubtedly one of the best performers, Healey lightened his entire body with pale chalk and danced on a 4-by-4-foot mirror directly underneath a suspended mirror cube. As blue paint dripped in a thin stream from the cube onto Healey's nearly naked body, an undulating EDM soundtrack pulsed, sounding like someone flipping through white noise channels during the zombie apocalypse. By the end, Healey was nearly all blue and the audience seemed completely awe-struck.
7. CLYTIGATION: A PRIMER - Michelle Ellsworth
Pairing with her other performances and art installation for TBA, Ellsworth's "dance" was actually a speech she delivered awkwardly that explained how dance is the perfect way to escape notice of the NSA. Dance, that is, and hiding yourself in a blue box the size of a Port-A-Potty and creating your own offline internet that includes imagined Skype conversations. "I feel completely understood," Ellsworth said of her new style of socializing, where she plays the role of all her friends. Just when we thought BLUE couldn't be topped, Ellsworth overflow The Redd with laughter.
8. COVER ME OVER - sub.set.dance
The interest level dropped drastically with sub.set.dance's interpretive offering, where a small company of women wearing what were essentially white T-shirts performed a lyrical, contemporary piece that involved a lot of fondling their own breasts. It felt like the type of thing an art school student created with good intentions for a lot of deeper meaning. Maybe we were just still hooked on Ellsworth's offline burger porn website idea.
9. ADJECTIVE, NOUN, ADVERB, VERB - Vincent Michael Lopez
Recently returned from a residency in Dhaka Bangladesh, Lopez scrapped his original idea last-minute and danced solo in a riveting and athletic work dedicated to his time in Dhaka. At times he seemed to be a starving street beggar, huddling on the lip of the stage and reaching a hand out to the front row of bleachers. Others times he moved so quickly through standing splits and break-dancing moves that he was just a blur.
10. !!$$$$$!! - Jen Hackworth
The Portland choreographer came running through the stands to the Friday Night Football theme song, presented herself on the stage like a proud Olympic gymnast after sticking a triple-flip, and then the soundtrack flipped to a melancholy singer-songwriter ballad as Hackworth awkwardly twitched for the next few minutes. Looking very average in Adidas track pants pulled up too high and a bra-less crop-top, she subtly turned 360 degrees, displaying herself while twitching just enough for the soft undersides of her arms to giggle. It would have been pathetic. But when the twitching 360 was complete, Friday Night Football blasted again, Hackworth took a bow and ran a circuit around the front row getting high-fives and cheering herself on.
Ten dances, none tiny. And at $10 day-of admission, this was probably the most bang for you buck you'd find at TBA this year.
WWeek 2015