The entertainment at last night’s TBA performance of crushed, from Seattle dance/video/music hybrid locust started before the dancers ever got on stage. A few seconds into PICA PR head Patrick Leonard’s call for donations from the stage, a full water bottle fell from the Washington High School auditorium balcony and hit a woman in the ground floor audience on the head.
Both the woman and the bottle were fine—stunned, but fine—but it wasn’t the last time that abrupt, jarring physical contact was showcased that night (not to mention crushed bugs, green helium balloons or spike heels).
Locust is an odd beast, the hybrid offspring of two truly gifted artists: choreographer Amy O’Neal and beatboxer/musician Zeke Keeble. Keeble manipulates a mic and laptop on stage to form the soundscape backbone of a locust piece—full of driving beats and wild, zinging notes—while O’Neal stomps and stutters her fascinating mix of contemporary dance and hip hop across the stage. She often starts with ballet’s strong, erect carriage and an arsenal of arabesques, attitudes and plies only to pop and lock every joint out of its place, pile rhythm upon rhythm upon the body and top the whole thing off with a finger flick or an epic booty shake. At one point in crushed the four women in the company appear in oversized hoodies and heels. It’s an apt image for O’Neal’s dance: full of hip hop’s signature aggression and larger than life personas yet always feminine, her moves are infectious, energizing stuff; dance that sucks you in and makes you want to get off your ass and join in (or at least try). With sound and movement like this, a narrative is almost besides the point. Still, locust, tries—although in crushed, it’s not entirely successful.
Crushed is supposedly about the idea of being “blindsided.” But the piece, with its series of increasingly agitated encounters between pairs of dancers and map cap races to claim squares and stripes of light shifting across the floor, just plays out like a seriously sexy turf war. Past shows, including convenience, which the group performed at TBA in 2005, integrated video in eclectic and interesting ways. In crushed, video felt like the odd man out. An opening sequence of a giant man menacing a grasshopper was charming, but later video-only vignettes seemed superfluous. At one point, the dancers’ literal battle for the spotlight onstage mimicked a ghostly green-lit drama playing out behind them on video. But the live action was so compelling, the canned version was unnecessary. In a more successful moment, the video backdrop pictured a man leaning against a wall as O’Neal danced live in front of him, eventually joined by her four cohorts. I got so used to him back there that he became real to me, until I noticed that the shadows flitting across the lime wall behind him didn’t match up with the real dancers. They were moving through their own shadow choreography, a brain-bending counterpoint to the live action.
Luckily, none of them—live or recorded—ever reached for a water bottle.
Amy O’Neal performs a second piece for TBA, entitled too, this week. AMYO/Tinyrage at The Works at Washington High School, 531 SE 14th Ave., 6:30 pm Thursday-Saturday, Sept. 10-12. $15-$20.
Photos of locust in crushed by Peter Mumford and Gabriel Bienzycki courtesy of www.locustsucka.com/PICA.
[...] choreographer Amy O’Neal melds an education in ballet with crazy hip-hop chops (Kelly Clarke explained it better than I can). She’s a joy to watch, and in this show she brings in friends from all over the world via [...]
[...] O’Neal is rightly well known for her kinetic, inventive hip hop dance with locust (read WW’s review of their TBA performance this week) and with performance artist Reggie Watts, but in her TBA Fest show with Ellie Sandstrom, [...]