Sitting down to watch Kokoro Dance‘s Embryotrophic Cavatina, I wasn’t sure what to think when the four dancers stepped onto the semi-lit stage wearing nothing but underpants and a layer of white dust over their bodies. I wasn’t sure what to do as they simply stood there, one each at the four points of an invisible square, staring directly ahead. I wasn’t sure what was happening, looking from one still figure to the next as the seconds ticked by, until in an instant my eyes seemed to refocus; while I had been puzzling away, the dancers had somehow turned their gaze to a forty-five degree angle entirely without my notice. That was when I was sure I was in for something interesting.
The thing about Barbara Bourget and Jay Hirabayashi’s Embryotrophic Cavatina is that it doesn’t allow its audience the leisure of settling in; rather, it required complete involvement of the mind. Rarely were the dancers (Molly McDermott and Billy Marchenski, as well as Bourget and Hirabayashi themselves) completely coordinated, but in a way that seemed deliberate. When taking into account each dancer’s immense level of strength and the poise of their movements, how could it be anything but? Their motions conveyed something that was entirely alien, yet somehow eerily familiar.
The tendency in the first half of the performance to have the dancers performing the same set of movements but have one slightly off-beat from the others prevented the audience from being lulled by the harmony of haunting music and the surreal motions. The audience’s silence became an active part of the performance, so much so that when the stage was cleared at the end of act one there was no clapping; everyone was afraid to break the carefully crafted atmosphere.
During the second half, when stellar lights, backdrops and costume by Gerald King and Tsuneko Kokubo (respectively) came more into play, the performance shifted. Now each dancer moved on their own time, in their own way, never touching each other, existing in their own world. Focusing on all dancers at once — which had been difficult in act one — now became impossible. Yet there was still a rhythm and connectedness, and as the performance went on it became clear that the dancers were on a cycle, with each of the four parts being taken up by one dancer after the other in a slowly unwinding spiral of evolution.
More than anything, it was the dancers’ total physical and emotional commitment to the performance that left me affected. That in itself was perhaps the most beautiful and stunning part of the performance. So when I departed from the theatre I still wasn’t sure what to think, what to do, or what exactly had happened, but I know that I left Embryotrophic Cavatina feeling different, and perhaps that is the real point.
Photo credit: Chris Randle