 |
 |
 |
SF BAY GUARDIAN, SF (continued)
In the second half of the show, the audience is greeted by a suspended circular
cage into which the dancers climb. For a moment the ball looks like an approximation
of Atlas carrying the globe. But as it begins to rotate, what was a static
image of confined bodies acquires life. Limbs emerge, hands hold other hands,
torsos shift, and one by one bodies eject and scatter.
Since this part of the program follows a return voyage, each leg of the trip
gets double exposure. "Diving In" 's single dancer descends headfirst,
recoils, and floats from a trapeze. "Breaking Through" is animated
by a wormlike dancer, who crawls out of crumbly ground on the video screen
– then repeats it live, emerging from a pile of bodies. In both cases,
the performers look more than a little surprised.
For "Lithosphere," two dancers wearing black athletic gear, arm
guards, and pointe shoes hump along the ground, arching torsos on all fours
and carving space with extended limbs. The movements and the costumes shape
the dancers into positive and negative space. Sometimes the images are quite
simple. To suggest the motion of earth masses, Lomax has her performers –
wearing horizontally striped brown tones – gradually come together into
a pyramid that breaks apart under pressure from the outside.
In "Mantle" the dancers move tentatively, arms outstretched, colliding
and separating. We see them onstage either as black silhouettes or bathed
in a reddish glow. But their images on-screen remain a constant, ghostly white.
