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Flash Review 1, 4-20: Pilfered by
Graham
"The Thief" Steals Our Attention
By Darrah Carr
Copyright 2001 Darrah Carr
Karen Graham's evening-length work,
"The Thief," which opened last night at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church,
is a clever exploration of text, movement, and group dynamics. The cast included
guitarist-composer Geoff Gersh, who performed live from stage left, and five dancers,
one of whom, Ms. Graham, assumes the role of the Thief. In this character, she
spent half of her time perched on a precariously balanced stack of books upstage
right, watching the others dance, read aloud, and interact. The rest of the time
Ms. Graham moved among the other performers, stealing the books they read and
mimicking their movements.
Though she moved among the other
dancers, the Thief rarely danced with them. A strong sense of group versus other
existed from the start. The group interacted by assuming spatial positions which
occasionally recalled social dance structures, then deftly trading places, swapping
books, and finishing each other's sentences. Out of these group interactions,
lovely solo dances emerged. Allyson Green, Charlotte Grifffin, and Emily Coates
interspersed pedestrian gestures and searching glances throughout their light-footed
sweeping dancing.
Toward the end of each of their solos,
Ms. Graham descended from her post with feline grace, and begin to copy the dancer's
movements, both a few feet and a few counts behind her. In this way, the Thief
erased the distinction between spoken text and movement vocabulary, stealing both
with abandon, and making the audience consider each as an equal means of story-telling.
Throughout the evening, Dan Illian,
the primary narrator, read various passages aloud, keeping the audience informed
as to where we were in the story -- which chapter, which line, whether it was
summer or winter -- while also giving hints as to the Thief's curious personality.
We learned that she speaks of herself only in the third person, that she learns
by repetition, and that she is "still missing the long-ago missing." This missing
was perhaps magnified for Ms. Graham as she watched Mr. Illian and Ms. Green share
a tender duet, moving in exact unison, always connected via a hand-hold or embrace
of the other's waste. As noted, the Thief rarely moved with another, often missing
a sense of togetherness by a few counts, followed by a swift retreat to her post.
Not until the final moments of the
dance did the Thief relinquish her insistence on speaking in the third person,
allowing herself to move to the center of the group, and engage in complete unison
movement with the other dancers. Ms. Graham's thought-provoking, tightly-crafted
work, continues Friday and Saturday at Danspace Project at 8:30. For more information,
please visit the Danspace Project web page on
our site.
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