I thought I always appreciated people who contemplate and struggle to grasp the meaning of life…until last weekend. A dancer friend invited me to a show at New Dance Group, which featured one of her students. I had no idea what to expect until I showed up and read the front of the program: “Shifters: a physical theater performance that shifts us from the love of power to the power of love.”
Oh boy.
I read on while I waited for my friends to arrive.
Program: Shifters is an insalata mista of dance, drama, video and music that offers a compelling visceral, verbal and kinesthetic account of the constantly changing world we live in.
Me: Um…Wha?
Program: It is about the vision of an unstable world in a state of constant flux, cyclically moving back and forth from the poles of disintegration and recreation.
Me: Oh dear.
Program: The dance places the individual as creator of a new myth—a myth of cooperation, rather than competition, of networks rather than markets, of sustainability rather than exploitation, of unity rather than fragmentation.
Me: Oh Christ. If only Special K were here with me to see this, and not canvassing the city looking for another goddamn place to get a blowout.
Program: Suppose money plays chess against love…We are entering the “jump time” when every given is literally up for grabs: Negotiation or vengeance. Synthesis or opposition. Peace or war.
Me: Jump time! (Giggling to self uncontrollably.)
The performance did not disappoint. Dancers covered in black and white sheets in a chessboard formation flailed and flopped about on the floor like fish on land, twisting the black and white sheets into a tangle of—you guessed it!—symbolic gray. Two girls holding giant opposing chess boards overhead—one covered in rose petals, the other in crumpled fake dollar bills—had an uber-modern version of a dance-off while footage of sands through the hourglass rolled on the backdrop, culminating with the choreographer/director/star dancer crying dramatically, while writhing on the floor, “I choose…LOVE!” Each segment ended with a similarly profound statement (e.g. “I choose…peace!”).
After 60 minutes of…this, I started to get hungry. I looked at my watch for the 300th time. Only 15 minutes to go!
Right then the entire cast entered stage left with a super-sized chessboard topped with an arrangement of red, white, yellow and pink rose petals. But from the back of the dark room to a hungry and deliriously bored me, it looked like…pizza. Mhmmm.
“I choose…PIZZA!” I declared in a stage whisper to my equally amused friends—a little too loudly, apparently, as a handful of people in the two rows in front of us turned around. Oops.
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