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SF BAY GUARDIAN, SF
Rad planet
Capacitor's latest: truly groundbreaking.
CAPACITOR'S DIGGING IN the Dark has taken a while to see daylight. But honing
the piece has paid off: The finished product is a slickly produced, visually
intriguing, and sometimes totally absorbing show that attempts to elevate
scientific fact into the realm of the imagination. Expanding dance to include
other kinetic styles, like acrobatics and circus techniques, has given choreographer
Jodi Lomask an elastic language with which to explore the geophysics that
get her creative juices flowing.
Digging, while not exactly Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth,
takes Lomask's travelers on an inventive expedition inside the planet. Lomask
didn't do it alone. In addition to the company's nine "movement artists"
(a.k.a. dancers), the program lists seven sound contributors (who, with sound
director Noah Thorp, should get separate applause) – plus three designers
for the (gorgeous) videos, four for the props, and three for the rigging.
That is a lot of commitment by a lot of talented people
Succinct program notes explain the portions of the journey. While they may
not be necessary, they illuminate the reasoning behind the choreography. They
also make for fascinating reading. Do you remember, for instance, the precise
makeup of the earth's crust, the lithosphere, the mantle, and the inner and
outer core? Some of the relationships between the facts and their performed
interpretations are not all that clear, but it doesn't matter. The work has
to stand on its own. And it mostly does.
Digging's most successful sections bring to the stage two different facets
of the Earth's fiery core. One examines the effects of trapped energy; the
second, of energy in motion. In the pre-intermission segment, the dancers
flow together into double circle formations, pulling and pushing but staying
connected. The effect is not unlike that of those pulsating pattern dances,
photographed from above in a technique pioneered by Busby Berkeley. Here,
through the magic of live video, these kaleidoscopic images are transformed
into pulsating, glowing images of energy that threaten to explode. (continues)
