For Now !
Because what else is performance for? To make us lean in, swell a moment. To be present. To attend to the crafting of time, space, and relationship as it unfolds around us.
Chloe Marie’s new dance work, For Now !, delivered on that promise. With a light, comforting touch, created in collaboration with seven dancer/performers, the project premiered at Christ Church Neighborhood House on April 30, part of Philadelphia Dance Project’s “Dance Up Close” series.
As the lights dim, the performance begins with what I recognize immediately as Chloe’s disembodied voice (I soon notice she is sitting on the floor in front of the audience, just off-stage to the far right). I feel like we are about to hear a curtain speech, reminding us to turn off phones or refrain from photography. But instead of announcements and rules, Chloe details the unfolding of our experience so far, starting with our arrival at the building, entering through the east door, taking the elevator or stairs up to the fourth floor. In the lobby, Chloe explains, we encountered Lee Clarke, For Now !’s composer and musician, playing acoustic guitar.
Now settled in our seats in a dark theater, she invites us to take a moment, breathe, and feel ourselves in the space. Part meditation, part pre-show speech, and part mini-lecture, Chloe introduces the (unseen) tech support members by name, and then moves on to describing details about the space and conventions of the theater. Dance often takes place on a rolled-out piece of vinyl flooring, commonly referred to in the dance world as “marley,” she explains. And the arrangement of this performance space follows the traditional proscenium model, where the audience is separated from the performers.
Finally, the group of seven dancers enters. Standing clustered at center stage, they whisper and gesture to each other for several minutes, an activity which I immediately recognize as them going over the show; to members of the audience who are not dance insiders this is probably an opaque moment. They finish and exit; shortly thereafter Chloe cues them with an “and” on the mic (imagine a conductor lifting their baton before the downbeat), and they enter again. This time, I notice they are all wearing name tags on their shirts.
There’s a confident, millennial feel to this performance. It sparkles in its easy playfulness. Scene after scene unfolds, following a smart, transparent structure: a soloist emerges, the group opposes and then reabsorbs the performer until the next solo emerges. Particularly memorable is a gorgeous flow of reeling seamless movement performed by marisa illingworth. Another standout is Amalia Colón-Nava, who kneels in stillness and then begins subtle, meditative torso undulations while the group huddles off to the side.
Standing center stage again, this time in a tight circle, the crowd of performers push into each other, creating tension, and then they transfer that tension into pulling away from each other, holding hands briefly in a ring before squeezing together again. They become building blocks, fitting into each other like tetris or lego pieces; soon marisa scales this human mountain, walking on the other dancers’ backs and, briefly, their shoulders.
Lee Clarke is present onstage the entire time, performing from a table in the upstage right corner. His electronic music sound score is both soothing and driving, sometimes bubbling and sometimes flowing. It’s pleasing. I lean in.
The group exits yet again, and Chloe brings them on again, this time calling them back by saying their names one by one. As an insider to this community, I notice right away that the names called and the people entering don’t match up. The name tags make the mis-match potentially noticeable to everyone in the audience, though the tags are probably only legible in the first few rows. Later on when Chloe calls their names again, they gather upstage left–this time they get it “right.” Here, the work gestures towards the slippery notion of identity and the ways that subject formation can feel iterative over time. Self is understood–and sometimes misunderstood–in relation to community.
Chloe is on the mic again, this time narrating in great detail her day before this. Specifically, her breakfast salad. While she goes over the details, the dancers are all moving at once, mostly performing unrelated solos, sometimes pairing off or weaving through the other group members. I feel my mind wander, pondering the details of her breakfast: Radicchio. Fennel. Poached eggs. “How does fennel grow?” Chloe muses. She asks the dancers if any of them know. Or is she asking the audience? I think I know how fennel grows. Wait–Amalia is also a farmer. I know this, because I know Amalia, we have worked together before and she was my cousin’s housemate for a while, and we took that one dance class together. She must know how fennel grows. Why doesn’t she speak up? Is this salad speech scripted or improvised? I’m thinking too much. Chloe has moved on: she’s looking forward to summer, tubing, drinking a beer, floating down the river with her friends. I reflect on the spaciousness in this performance. There is room, and even an invitation, for me to think my thoughts, to be fully in my now. I watch my brain watching itself. And then I slip back into the shared now of what is unfolding on the stage.
As if in conversation with my thoughts, the dancers settle in the corner and remind me of their realness, their personhood. One dancer scratches her face, another sneaks in a pit-sniff, they check in with each other. It’s beautifully human. I lean in again.
A satisfying rhythmic unison begins, the only moment of its kind in this show, they shake their hips side to side while performing quick arm gestures on top. The dancers depart from this group movement in canon, moving in and out of the floor, extending their legs which trail behind them, describing huge arcs in the air. This is a group of Philly’s finest movers and it’s a pleasure to witness them as they cascade across the stage together. A duet between Alex Brazinski and Dylan Smythe is another highlight. They push into and fold over each other with a forceful intensity that remains flowing and graceful, a beautiful merging of softness and power. Their weight-sharing duet ends in an embrace, a gesture which then populates through the group so that everyone is hugging.
Soon, the dancers cluster around a microphone next to Lee’s table upstage. They are all talking at once, sometimes a voice stands out, some of them are describing their own solos earlier in the piece. Lee begins looping and distorting their voices, so the layers multiply, iterate.
Chelsea Murphy picks up the microphone, offering a series of detailed movement descriptions that grow from the real and material to the magically real and spectacular: “I step on stage and feel the warmth of the lights,” “my right pointer finger is tracing my ankle, moving up my leg,” and then, later: “I walk across their shoulders and continue for miles, I look at the sky.” While Chelsea continues, she moves to different places in the room, and the group returns to moving all at once, all over the space, doing different things. It feels scattered. Disjointed. My attention is soothed by Chelsea’s voice, and the magic of the text itself, which I later learn is improvised.
The work has a soft landing, and it’s over just as I was leaning in again. As though the audience is coming out of a long meditation, scattered applause begins, then heats up, with whoops and hollers buoying the cast through their bow and offstage.
In the elevator after the show, I overhear a conversation between two audience members. “What did you think?” (Pause.) “I don’t know.” (Laughter.) “I don’t know either. There was a lot going on and also not a lot going on. It felt a lot like the way I think.” Yes, I think to myself, whipping my notebook back out to record this serendipitous moment. For Now ! is a lot like thinking, and a lot like being. Inviting me to contemplate the collage of life and the cacophony of its internal and external signals and responses. The elevator doors open. “Let’s go!” I say to my date. Their warm hand wraps around mine. The experience of For Now ! continues as we walk out into the night. For all the nows.
Read more by Megan Bridge on Artblog.
