THE KAY AND CHRISTY SHOW
I like to watch dance partly because I like to watch people, and I understand people best when I see them move. Performances give me license to stare. As in any form of people watching, the attraction is difference, so I was grateful for the contrasts between Kay Wendt LaSota and Christy Munch in their joint show at Link’s Hall. LaSota’s like a collage artist, someone who uses found objects and combines them in her own way, while Munch is more the traditional painter, the artist who wants to communicate her own vision in every detail.
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Their differences were distilled in two unrelated solos they performed simultaneously, I Don’t Want to Fall on My Head Anymore: each does her own thing in her own little square onstage for about two minutes while Jefferson Airplane’s “Embryonic Journey” plays. Munch’s square, marked with tape in an upstage corner, sets her apart from the audience and focuses our attention on her: it’s like the frame around a painting. The lighting, her costume, and her careful opening pose–all curves and counterbalances–establish that she is the art. When she moves, her undulations and retreats are the meaning. LaSota is closer to the audience, in a downstage corner marked by a cloth on the floor, and she’s not the only thing in her square: she crouches behind a box and manipulates paper, fire, little plastic figures, like Mr. Wizard demonstrating a science project or the unmoved mover at work. There’s something unmediated and matter-of-fact about her “performance,” which focuses on the world outside herself.
The movement throughout is plain, everyday stuff: runs, cartwheels, walks, somersaults, crawls. There’s no music, until LaSota plays a few bars of “Shall We Gather at the River?” on a piano at the end. And she clearly encourages undancerly performance, a 60s kind of focus on merely completing movement tasks (she and Saner–both former members of the archly naive Sock Monkeys, now defunct–have this style in their bones). Such straightforward choreography and performance give the impression that we’re seeing real people doing real things, not dancers in choreographed movement. With LaSota, who makes no bones about relying on her dancers’ input, I think that impression is true. When Saner cups his hand, looks at it, looks at us, and draws it passionately around his head, we know that what we’re seeing is him. That kind of directness and immediacy fuels the emotional fires, which in Floating Cage are considerable. When Saner folds Reid into his body and rolls with her, we not only see their reconciliation, but feel it.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Yony Cifani.
