XSight! Performance Group
The opener, Cycle of Unveiling, is at one end of the current XSight! spectrum, the end focused on angels, love, death, and transcendence. Five of the dancers–Carpenter, Martha Donovan, Jeffery, Kim, and Julia Rhoads–are nude except for strategic bits of gauzy cloth. But it’s amazing what a little bit of cheesecloth can do: I’ve never seen nudity onstage as offhand and natural as this. Where complete nudity is often an affront, a challenge (think of Bill T. Jones), nakedness just barely covered somehow expresses simply the stripped-down human. Further distancing us from the dancers’ nakedness are lengths of the same gauzy cloth hanging from ceiling to floor between the stage and the audience; a sixth, clothed dancer (Holly Quinn) first pulls these aside and later pulls them down.
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The piece really comes together when Carpenter’s text, recited by the two performers almost in unison, begins: it seems at first to describe a bad dream in which keys are lost and someone returns late at night to a kitchen. Then it’s explicitly said not to be a dream, as they realize that “he’s my…” and “I forgot to…” Who he is and what was forgotten are never made clear; but as Carpenter and Kim jangle sets of keys like chilly castanets and draw them sensuously over their bodies to Merrilee Rush’s “Angel of the Morning,” the anger and guilt and sense of loss and separation are palpable.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/William Frederking.
