Robynne M. Gravenhorst and Debra Levasseur Lottman
The Crow bows to the audience, doffing his top hat, strutting across the ominously darkened stage. His ragged black suit makes his glittering red eyes bright as he repeats rounded gestures of lifting, cradling, and carrying so abstract he sometimes seems to be begging or inviting us to dance. But these are the gestures of a grave robber, one of les corbeaux (“the crows”) at the turn of the century pilfering bodies to be used in illegal dissections. Robynne M. Gravenhorst’s dance-opera Les Corbeaux is not only his story, but the story of Charlotte DeVoux, a young woman whose passion to understand anatomy has led her to a mysterious death.
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Gravenhorst and her collaborators have created a haunting, visionary, symbolically charged morality tale shot through with mythic irony. Charlotte’s journey from naive girl to woman destroyed by her obsession to know “the mind of God” is not solitary or simple. Leanne Vancil as Charlotte is accompanied by her conspirator/lover the Crow (Kirk Nathaniel Nowak) and three flayed cadavers (Jennifer Gallo, Christian Gochenour, and Lisa Feuer) whose exposed and interlocking muscles provide a constant reminder of the grisly work of knowledge and science. The cadavers (whose nude bodies have been painted with visceral reality by Creative Makeup Design Studio) are witnesses, stagehands, clowns, companions, and interpreters for the pantomimed story of Charlotte’s moral decline.
When Charlotte continues her studies after her father’s death–simply evoked by a black veil pinned to her hair–she begins her spiral into obsession. Trading sex for corpses to dissect, learning to overcome her revulsion at the sight of a corpse, she becomes coldly scientific. Like Dr. Frankenstein, she struggles to catalog and activate the seat of life but is frustrated by the emptiness of the corpses, which yield facts of biology but no insight into greater truths. Her dissections became more and more intense, her gestures of cutting transformed with a brash, tangolike sensuality that marks her loss of innocence. Finally, she and the corpses subtly mirror one another: as the blade moves down the cadaver’s arm, she passes it lightly over her own, not cutting, but wondering–how am I different? Because the voice-overs and songs are carefully spare, the story is told primarily through these gestures, which intensify the mythic feeling of horror.
