Taking a Big Bite

©Martha Sherman

Keely Garfield takes her time to craft and develop new work, and when the ideas have had sufficient cooking time, they bubble up and emerge. This year, Garfield’s offering, “Perfect Piranha,” arrives at the Chocolate Factory just in time for the holidays. Named for the carnivorous, sharp-toothed fish, Garfield uses the power of dance in a world of flesh-eating bitterness, to push away the inarticulateness of the White House’s current resident (“cretinous, inchoate,” in her more pungent description) for the potency of articulation.

Contemporary dance and performance are unique expressions, and performance artists take endless routes and diversions in explorations to their particular truths. But even among these diverse voices, Garfield is an iconoclast. In “Perfect Piranha,” she moves not in the direction of this era’s pessimism and violence – but in a powerful drive toward our better selves.

Garfield joins three glorious dancers, Paul Hamilton, Raja Feather Kelly, and Emma Rose Brown, to create a riveting quartet. The group moves in waves and in forms – from a dense square into diamonds or lines or exploding into the corners of the room -- whatever it takes to pull us along. And the dancers’ feet never stop – stomping, slapping, parading. Their musical accompaniment includes jiggling English dance hall music, pressing “Daisy, Daisy” and “Down by the Old Mill Stream” into the service of movement that is anything but tinny.

The dancers are characters with ambiguous back stories, whose movement (and vocalized text) suggests layers that we can’t see. When Kelly pirouettes in 5, 6, 7 turns, his ease and confidence suggest that he could excel in any dance form, but the possibilities presented by dance hall music are an unexpected lure. When the clattery music shifts to crackles and traffic and the flow of water, the dancers’ movement is just as changeable. Collapsing to the floor on their backs, they lay flat palms to their foreheads in a soft salute to what is unseen, but coming.

Garfield’s choreography has never shrunk from life. She has created small epics circling around the crises of domestic life on the one hand, and the large questions of existence – Whys and Hows – on the other. The relationships among the four Piranha dancers are filled with ritual and repetition, and the articulation of their gestures is deeply satisfying – every angled elbow, extended arms, bobbing head is a piranha jaw of sharp specificity; the edginess, though is gentled by funny, loving glances tossed among the dancers. Periodically, they sing or call to each other (Garfield’s voice, especially, rings out), and in one sentimental scene, replete with hankies, they share a sentimental cry over “Tony,” wondering if he’s happy, and if he’s “thinking about me.” The more particular the moment, the more endearing – funny or troubling – it is, but all the little moments add up, the textures of life.

“Piranha” allows the dancers their own moments and solo turns, but they are always edging closer to each other, their movement memes echo each other, and together, they dash forward into new possibilities. They close with an intense dance within a dance that Garfield calls the “Mandala.” Co-created with the artists, this driving shared section is based on Garfield’s own solo improvisation, filmed after a rehearsal. The lines of the dancers’ movement are dense and alluring, and they fill the stage before collapsing into a tight circle. Finally, they spy on each through small O’s created by circling their fingers around their own eyes, a tiny articulation of how deeply they are intertwined, like a little black hole of intense connection.

An essential goal of this work, Keely Garfield insists, is to communicate the message: “I am here.” And in a painfully divided world, she freely admits that this art is entirely political. She and her troupe will dance until they drop, determined to express – and achieve -- connection, and joy.

Photos

Top: Keely Garfield in “Perfect Piranha.” Photo ©Jeff Berman

Bottom: L to R: Emma Rose Brown, Keely Garfield, Paul Hamilton in “Perfect Piranha. Photo ©Brian Rogers

"Perfect Piranha"
Keely Garfield
Chocolate Factory
November 29 - December 9, 2017

http://chocolatefactorytheater.org/keely-garfield-perfect-piranha/

 

Comments

[Janet Banks]

Absolutely fascinating!

[Susanna Shapiro]

This is such an amazing blog! Your writing is brilliant, the theme is uplifting, and you manage to create a vehicle for this visual/physical art form to be translated into words - no small task! Nice work & definitely makes me want to see "Perfect Piranha"!