Jan Erkert & Dancers
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Whole Fragments begins with the onset of illness–the dancers walk backward with their arms raised as if they were being robbed, disappearing into a translucent tent. We see their shadows moving on the tent wall as well as videos of them performing the same movements projected onto other tent panels. They seem to have been taken away, sequestered in a half-world. A male dancer (Mark Schulze) keeps pulling a female dancer (Carrie Hanson) to her feet, but she always falls, spinning on her hip until she comes to rest. Schulze and Hanson leave the tent; he pulls her up again, lifting her to his shoulders in one fluid motion, then setting her on her feet, but she falls again. These images and others–rolling on the floor, convulsing–repeat as if in a morphine dream. Halfway through the dance the tent starts to come apart as recovery begins. Toward the end, images of caretaking dominate–one person lying on the floor convulses; another runs his or her hands over the ill person, smoothing contorted limbs back into place. These images repeat in waves, the performers switching roles with every repetition.
Schulze, Hanson, Suet May Ho, and Chia Yu Chang dance fluidly and articulately throughout. Each moment of every movement is given its weight; the dancers don’t muscle through or shortchange the choreography. (The fifth dancer is a newcomer who hasn’t mastered Erkert’s style yet.) Erkert celebrates the brain and nerves rather than the muscles; we don’t watch how high a dancer jumps but the interplay of brain and nerves as a hurtling body hits the ground, absorbs the shock, and miraculously redirects its momentum so that the dancer slides unhurt to the floor and spins or rolls, discharging excess energy in an unexpected way.
An older dance by Erkert, Antigamente, reveals the result when high ambitions are met. A woman (Chang) is seen in her world–a bed of leaves. Blown by offstage winds, she rolls in the leaves in wild loops, nests in them, and spins like a dervish. Chang seems as simple as an animal–a ground squirrel perhaps–living its completely material life. Chang is full of desires but without passion, that uniquely human thing.
