GLASS SLIPPER TOTEM
Of course “those people” weren’t trying to hurt me; they just wanted to express their pain. My paranoia subsided but didn’t entirely leave me: I still didn’t trust these people.
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Nor did this evening-length dance give me many good reasons to trust them. Although Glass Slipper Totem intriguingly combines dancers and musicians who dance, the piece focuses intently on suicidal thoughts, tangled and fruitless relationships, and the dangers of getting lost in complete self-absorption. A duet by Molly Shanahan and David Dieckmann seems at first like a new friendship or romance: side by side they repeat the gestures of touching their own faces and solar plexuses, scraping the floor with their fingers, and collapsing from the waist. Then Shanahan pulls Dieckmann to his feet by the arm; he walks away, but she leaps on his back. They repeat the sequence a couple of times, going faster, then break into a duet filled with bruising and violent movement: slapping the floor, making obscene gestures, grabbing each other, collapsing. It’s a good picture, but a bleak one, of a relationship gone sour.
Much of the dancing is good, particularly McGinley’s and Dieckmann’s. Dieckmann is a musician who just started dancing, but his leaps and barrel turns are soaring and virile. McGinley has a plangent solo in the second half on a stage strewn with oranges.
