HQ Review: New Movements at Greenfinch Theater and Dive
Nestled into the quaint black box theater at Greenfinch Theater & Dive on a breezy Friday night, an oversold audience crowded into and spilled around an assortment of eclectic, makeshift seating for New Movements, a mixed media performance assembled as a fundraiser for Saint Louis Sudbury School. There’s something beautifully charged and welcoming about the makeshift aesthetics of the performance space, a place that feels incredibly fertile for experimental performance.
The evening consisted of 4 new works by a wide range of multi-disciplinary artists. Alex Cunningham, a Saint Louis-based violinist, opened the evening with an electric performance intersecting the sounds of folksy fiddle tunes and frenzied, futuristic drones. Following came “From Paris to This Tiny Room” by Kblizo and Brooking Caldwell, a sprawling journey of spoken poetry blended with cavernous soundscapes created through live loops of trumpets, synth, and ukulele.
Diving further into multi-genre experiences came the third work of the evening, “Time for Rope (After Beckett)” created by the evening’s emcee, Zach TBD. Billed as a sequel to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist movement play “Quad”, this work featured four hooded figures walking in a series of geometric patterns accompanied by the metronomic sounds of clocks. Allusions to the perpetuity of time littered the work, with ropes knotted into small nooses swinging like the pendulum of a grandfather clock and the constant resetting of the clock-like pathways of the hooded figures. There was a combination of nonchalance and devotion to the work, creating a curious dialogue with the modernist roots of its source material.
Jane Tellini’s “To The Best of My Knowledge” concluded the evening as a shimmery tour-de-force of creative expression and experimentation in dance. A truly multidisciplinary work of dance-theatre, “To The Best of My Knowledge” is a reflection on the creative process itself, and a celebration of the strangeness, earnestness, and joy of dance. The work began simply and joyfully enough with the cast of nine dancers strutting their way in one large mob through a series of accumulating and repeating phrases, walking patterns sprinkled with pivots, side steps, jazz squares, small hops, and sweeping arms to the synthpop beats of Cut Copy’s “Need You Now”. On occasion, Tellini would call out numbers, indicating which movement phrase to move through next. Despite the cramped floor, the dancers swept through every corner of the space together before slowly disintegrating, leaving just two dancers in their wake. The duet that ensues, performed by Baylee McAllister and Zoe DeYoung, marks one of the most poignant and heartfelt moments of the evening. McAllister and DeYoung’s arms lap at each other’s backs in an embrace that mirrors waves brushing the side of a pier as Tellini and dancer Melissa Miller recite a rearrangement of Richard Siken’s poem “Saying Your Names.” Occasionally, one retreats, turns their back from the embrace, or pushes the other away, only to return once again. There’s a beauty and a complexity brought to light by the sheer simplicity of their tasks, and underscored by Leslie Salisbury’s sighing vocals. As the work progresses, it grows in its own curiosity and play. A trio of tangled, quaking limbs heaves and drifts itself across the floor. Melissa Miller puppets lines of Jonathan Burrows’ A Choreographer’s Handbook - “Let us begin with the idea that you know how to dance,” “This is just one way of beginning,” “If it doesn’t work, drop it.” The work becomes sentient and self-aware, reconstructing its own opening section from Burrows’ tools, culminating in a joyous dance party.
Taken as a whole, New Movements was a simultaneously grounding and transcendental experience, highlighting local artists whose works are elevating the city’s experimental arts scene. In its looseness and variety, the evening reflected the very communities it aimed to support—highly collaborative and teeming with curiosity.