CityArts

Speechless

by Bond Huberman  —  January 25, 2010

Eva Stone’s Chop Shop festival dices up disparate styles of modern dance to form a new language that people can actually understand.

It’s a January afternoon, and Cyrus Khambatta’s Phffft! Dance Theatre Company is rehearsing in a small studio in the choreographer’s West Seattle backyard. The group is working on a new piece, which began as a telephone poll: Khambatta picked random numbers from the phone book and called people to ask what they thought about the American Dream. In one segment of the piece that resulted from this research, two Phffft! company members, Morgan Nutt and Chris McCallister, perform a duet to the sounds of Alison Krauss and Robert Plant’s theatrical ballad “Sister Rosetta Goes Before Us.” They perform like two people in a competition. Or is it a relationship? One moment they are dancing together, the next, they trip one another up. As soon as Nutt is dragged down, McCallister offers her a hand to be helped up, like lobsters scrambling over one another to escape the boiling pot.

It doesn’t stop at what could be a metaphor for Darwinian capitalism. In the way it combines the music and the intense movement, the dance shows how actions affect others. It shows how we look when we’re angry and careless. How sometimes we don’t mean it, and sometimes we do.

More importantly, what “clicks” for me watching this dance is that, whatever the intent, these dancers are giving an idea a feel and a pulse.