Tessellate 2017 with the Battery Factory
I love a shorts program in summer. There’s a brisk and refreshing feeling sitting down for a series of concise narratives that mixes well with warmer weather. This weekend The Battery Factory presents Tessellate 2017--a FREE program of four original shorts that include some gracefully abstract narrative theatrical moods.
The show opens with Nabra Nelson's Exile from the Land of Gold. It’s a dance piece that cleverly renders a very emotional narrative. Four dancers deliver traditional African movements and motions to the stage culminating in a wedding dance in which the whole audience participates. There is an emotional connection between audience and dancers. The dance ends and everyone returns to their seats. There are a few muted moments and a shrouded figure appears to ensnare them. The emotional connection between audience and dancers fostered by the wedding dance gives the hunt and capture added intensity. It's a very engaging look at the nature of exhale.
Joelle Worm and Mindy Zarem's Day After Night is an elegant study in turbulence. The two dancers deal with suitcases, a compass and so much more in fluid angular anguish. It's a real triumph when the two find a balance between each other and slide into sync. Once things fall into place, there is a one last wistful moment before they exit the stage. Quite a touching journey.
The program returns after intermission for Honor Molloy’s And In My Heart--a piece that fuses monologue with dance. Angela Iannone and a thick Irish accent play the verbal end of a passionate narrative about love during an Irish revolutionary uprising. Zui Tao plays silent dance expression of the emotional end of the story. It's a nice fusion between the graceful abstraction of dance and the expressive cerebral end of spoken word.
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The program ends with tres historians y...not one love song. Maria Gillespie, Nguyen Nguyen and Erik Speth perform dance in three different narrative switch all express a personal dissonance against prevailing forces in intermittently dazzling abstraction. These expressions can be as simple and insidious as songs on the radio in a long car ride. They can be as obvious and painful as the complexities of the Vietnam war. Or they can be something different altogether and altogether more complex. The performance involves smartly simple wooden platform sculptures by Mike Rea and video projections on canvas. It’s quite an end to the show.
The Battery Factory’s Tessellate 2017 has one more performance tonight Jun. 24. The show starts at 7:00 pm at Kenilworth Studio 508. There is no charge for admission. For more information, visit The Battery Factory online.
