The Ribbon Factory
This thought came to mind as Mad Shak Dance Company premiered Molly Shanahan’s The Ribbon Factory, an ambitious piece that runs a full hour–an eternity in dance, with its convention of brief selections separated by pauses. At a certain point, no matter how original the movement, there’s just too much of it.
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The evening’s final image provides the clearest example of “overwriting.” A dancer enters trailing a thread, as though it were the leash of an invisible balloon. She anchors it to form a diagonal line across the stage while a second company member enters from the opposite wing carrying a thread at a different angle. Eventually all ten company members are weaving a stage-size web from these filaments, and some of the angles they create are quite lovely. But the process continues until dancers are ducking under and dodging around strings to position more strings. What began as a beautiful filigree has been elaborated into a trap.
Thus the evening’s most exciting figure features the entire ensemble. They begin on hands and knees, forming a line from upstage left to downstage right. Suddenly they all drop and roll downstage, looking simultaneously like an enormous machine–the factory’s production line–and like the drop-and-roll maneuver for surviving a fire. (The Triangle Shirtwaist factory fire? People sacrificed for the sake of beauty?) Then the dancer nearest the audience does a brief solo and exits. Drop and roll again, and the next dancer does an utterly different mini solo and departs. The machine has become a guillotine, chopping off the foremost dancer, until only one remains onstage, whereupon the entire troupe returns, each doing his or her solo. These meld into a new machine–or, to return to the dominant metaphor, are woven together like threads into a ribbon. For this image alone The Ribbon Factory is worth an evening’s attention.
