Limbic Fix
In this sultry, ominous climate, which simultaneously produces new and larger stages like the Music and Dance Theatre and anxieties about filling them, Limbic Fix is a gale of fresh air. A new contact-improvisation company of four women, they need only a bit of open space, some comfortable clothes, and their own nimble bodies and brains to produce art on the spot. No music, no props, no set or choreography.
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Not that it’s easy. Contact improvisation is 25 years old (a product of the hippie counterculture)–Limbic Fix member Kathleen Maltese has been doing it for 20 years. The other three women are much younger, but they’ve gotten together with Maltese at least once a week for at least a year. Not to rehearse, of course, but to learn one another’s bodies: their heft, the distribution of weight, their characteristic velocities and directions. Contact improv can be described in deceptively mechanistic terms; in a program note, Limbic Fix calls it “dancers explor[ing] flight, momentum, weight exchange and pathways through space, combining the laws of physics with the lawlessness of imagination.”
What really floored me, however, was the duet between Abrams and Miller. There was an immediate tension between them as Abrams literally pursued Miller around the stage, goading her into interaction. Miller resisted, first consenting only to intertwine hands, then running away. Like sisters quarreling, Abrams tried to tap Miller’s head and Miller irritably swung it out of touching range, then Abrams jumped Miller as she crawled away. Cornered, Miller faced Abrams with hands up, fingers curled, in a caricature of delicate resistance. After more chasing and retreating, Miller finally stopped resisting. I saw her make the decision to engage Abrams physically and emotionally, and what followed was remarkable. Rolling together, she and Abrams looked deeply involved in the sensuousness of their interaction, feeling weight against weight and skin on skin. Their connection made even such simple gestures as a hand on a rib cage piercing and fresh.
