Edgemode
Neither was the dancing. We comprehend dance, I think, in a different way than we do a story or an essay. In a difficult dance one part of the brain struggles to find the narrative and the meaning while another tries to process the emotion in the dancing; ideally all these perceptions merge as one watches the performance to create a satisfying whole. In choreography as difficult as Mordine’s these tasks are hard enough in themselves, and to do them all at once is often out of the question. When I woke up during the night after seeing Edgemode, however, the work made emotional sense to me. But by then I was putting together the pieces long after the fact: to fully recover the dancing I had to read my notes. And believe me, that’s nothing like watching a dance unfold.
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The deep sadness and loneliness underlying “Edgemode Part I: Travelers Warnings” is what unifies its disparate parts: Mordine dressed in a night shift and long coat, carrying a small suitcase and a fold-up seat; the dancers with gauzy bags tied over their heads, twitching and embracing stiffly, increasing the distance between them; the projected backdrops, of a vast, cloudy sky or a typewriter clacking out a message from the front lines. The first time I saw the piece I imagined Mordine to be isolated from, even threatened by, a group of young roughnecks, perhaps recent immigrants. On a second viewing, I saw her as one of them.
Gradually they work their way into real dancing, however, and the sound of waves crashing blends with the sound of machinery; later we hear a child singing in an unknown language. The score (by Wolman) and the dancing become more urgent, but I wouldn’t call them joyous. Instead some of the first part’s confrontation and fear reappear in a more vigorous danced form. Then, just as the dance seems to be moving into a joyful place, a phone rings, interrupting the spell. It’s a cellular phone, and as the dancer (Krenly Guzman) goes to his dance bag to answer it, the others stop dancing and return to everyday behavior.
When I woke out of my restless sleep the theme of migration in Edgemode seemed a metaphor for traveling away from loved ones on one’s own journey, a metaphor particularly for the distance that can develop between parent and child; and Guzman’s lively, friendly conversation with his mom, a sign of hope. The dance described in disembodied form by the typewriter seemed the spirit world, the world of art, where the artist mother hopes to meet her children and speak to them: it’s both what takes her away and what brings her back to them. And when my daughter climbed into bed with me Sunday morning, after I’d fallen back asleep, the vividness of her freckles and burnished hair and blue-gray-green eyes shocked me.
