So-Called Repetition
In the intervening 40 years, split-screen video has become a commonplace, but the wonder of that first encounter came back as I watched Esther Palmer’s video backdrop to So-Called Repetition, Molly Shanahan’s exceptional new work. The video shows a series of windows with a different dancer and single chair projected in each. It soon becomes apparent that the windows are those that run across one wall of the Link’s Hall studio, where the performance is taking place, and that the dancers’ chairs are actually a single chair, the original of which sits onstage. This alteration of perspective produces the same dizzying thrill as the go-cart video: Are the windows here or there? Which chair is real? How can the projected dancers be in color and the actual dancer seem to be in black and white? Shanahan’s multidimensional choreography, echoed and reinforced by Palmer’s video, gives visceral proof of how exhilarating it is just to be alive.
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When Shanahan returns she’s wearing elegant black evening attire. Though the earlier dancing couldn’t be described as tentative, she seems to move now with a new confidence and fluidity. The choreography becomes bolder and takes up more space, as though determined to reveal itself from all angles without the help of video projection or mirroring by a second dancer (at the opening performance, videographer Palmer). In the evening’s final figure, Shanahan’s arms reach to their full span, then she pumps them in a gesture of momentum as she moves forward: choo-choo! Though it embodies the rhythm brilliantly, it’s the only move whose timing is misjudged: Shanahan circled the stage perhaps five times doing it, and midway through the fourth, the audience began to shift in their seats. Perhaps she didn’t know exactly how to conclude–that’s the problem with doing a piece about repetition–or perhaps the point was to show that reiteration can exhaust the watcher as well as the doer. Overall, though, there’s a lot more exhilaration than exhaustion in So-Called Repetition.
