Musings From the Seattle Dance Collective

Seattle Dance Collective continues its second season with the fourth of five pieces, Musings by Amanda Morgan. As usual, the piece premiered online on a Thursday. But by now, the individual pieces are beginning to feel like a program that is organized along a gradient of tradition. Beginning with the beautifully filmed ballet Home, the pieces become progressively more experimental. A Headlamp or Two felt like a film whose content happened to be dance. Musings feels like a multimedia artwork in which the media are film, dance, and spoken word.

Seattle Dance Collective

The debut of Seattle Dance Collective, a new dance company founded by two of my favorite Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers, was last summer’s highlight. PNB principals Noelani Pantastico and James Yoichi Moore created SDC as a small, summer season contemporary ballet company mostly comprising PNB colleagues, but including dancers from Whim W’him. They presented one thrilling program at the Vashon Center for the Arts, and promised a new one for 2020.

Continuum – Bridging the Distance

Then the Fire Nation attacked the pandemic started. SDC leapt from planning a single live program to developing Continuum – Bridging the Distance. It’s a virtual program of five new works developed under physical distancing requirements. Each new piece posts on a Thursday in July, free for online viewing indefinitely.

Every dance was choreographed specifically for this program, with the knowledge that it would be viewed as a video rather than on a stage. Rehearsals took place during the lockdown on Zoom. Only dancers who were already sheltering in place together would perform together. At the actual filming, everyone but the dancers wore masks and maintained distance.  

Amanda Morgan and Nia-Amina Minor

Pacific Northwest Ballet dancer Amanda Morgan stands out on their stage as the only African-American ballerina in the company. But even if everyone wore bodysuits and masks, she’d be easy to spot. Morgan has limbs for miles that make the lines in ballet obvious to even oblivious viewers.

The first time I saw her choreography was as part of the 2018 Next Step program, when she performed her own ballet (and poem). I remember it mostly for the props and the poem, but can’t recall much about the movement. She also choreographed a short piece for Seattle Opera’s community discussion about Black representation in the arts, and I remember being impressed at how pretty it was for something she “whipped up last night.”

For this piece, she collaborated with  Nia-Amina Minor from Spectrum Dance Theater. I’ve seen (and loved) choreography by Spectrum’s director Donald Byrd, (most recently at Seattle Opera) but I don’t think I’ve seen Minor perform before.

Musings

Choreography: Amanda Morgan in collaboration with Nia-Amina Minor
Dancers: Amanda Morgan and Nia-Amina Minor
Music: Hannah Mayree

This piece speaks to the lack of spatial justice for Black and Brown individuals, especially during these times, and seeks to serve as an expression of hope that people will continue to think about their Black and Brown communities, and speak up for them looking ahead to the future.

Special thanks to: Edna Daigre, Randy Ford, Akoiya Harris, Zariyah Quiroz, Kenya Shakoor and Hannah Mayree.

Structure and Meaning

I have a bachelor’s degree in biology, and if I had to distill my undergraduate education into one sentence it would be:

Form follows function.

It applies as often in art as in nature and gave me a point of connection with Musings.  (The behind the scenes documentary was also invaluable in accessing this piece that could be quite challenging to your average ballet viewer.) In this case, the form wasn’t really a dance. There was dancing in it, but the dance was not continuous or even always the camera’s focus. In fact, one of the most exquisite moments in the film was an image of the wind disturbing the ivy on a brick apartment building.

As the title Musings suggests, the structure is nonlinear and disjointed, dealing in visual and conceptual  juxtapositions instead of narrative.

Music and Images

The music, when there was any, was a folky banjo number by Hannah Mayree. The pretty, countrified song played against urban environments and harmonized with the relatively natural backdrop of what looked like Volunteer Park. There were spoken parts where voices – maybe sometimes the dancers but also other people, perhaps those receiving special thanks. They talked about activity while stuck at home; about tenderness; about rebellion and making noise. When we hear these things, we see Morgan running in place while sitting on her front porch steps. We see dancing on a carless city street just above the freeway. We hear protest chants while the dancers stand still in a peaceful park. When a speaker talks about making noise, the music and the movement stop.

{Watch Musings below; on the SDC website; or on Vimeo.}

MUSINGS by Amanda Morgan from Seattle Dance Collective on Vimeo.

The Metaphorical Movement

One of my favorite movie moments is in The Nightmare Before Christmas when Jack Skelington tries make sense of Christmas. I really like for things to make sense. But sometimes there just isn’t a right answer.

via GIPHY

I know from social media that Morgan, who depends on her body for a living, took to the streets after the murder of George Floyd, risking covid and police violence for the movement towards social justice. Even for those who have not taken such decisive action, there is so much going on right now that developing a narrative seems impossible – and possibly premature. It’s too soon to make sense of it all. In that case, the most any artist can hope to do is capture the images and ideas.

Musings is just musings. It’s the preliminary step of deep, sometimes nonlinear, nonlogical thinking that precedes narrative.

That doesn’t make it random. Ideas juxtaposed in Musings all arise from the multiple crises we’re facing right now.

I wasn’t familiar with the term spacial injustice before now. This is where the documentary was especially helpful. There were examples, like how life during social distancing is harder for people in a 600 square foot apartment than a suburban house with a yard. Like the extra burden for people who have to take public transit to receive healthcare and other services, compared to people who live close enough to walk. Plus it was a relief to hear in the documentary that Morgan was taking a college class about it – whew, it’s not something everyone else already knows about. Rewatching Musings, I could see some of these ideas in the contrasts of noise and quiet; in bare feet on pavement; in the way the dancers often stood still or moved in place, even when there was space to move around.

The Physical Movement

But one of the things I didn’t actually see a lot of was dancing. There was actually a lot more dancing in the behind the scenes film than the Musings film. In fact, the dancers were not always onscreen in Musings. When they were there, they weren’t always dancing – at one point, Morgan is literally twiddling her thumbs. Even when they are dancing, you rarely can see their whole bodies. These are all conscious, artistic choices and it’s really only a problem if you’re hung up on the definition of dance. Being a bit pedantic myself, I had to get over it.

I wouldn’t really call Musings a dance. Even more than The Only Thing You See Now, it couldn’t really be performed on a stage. But when the pandemic is over, I would love to see it as an installation at the Henry. If I saw it there, I would be so excited to see dance incorporated in a multimedia art piece. There would be a program or plaques where I could read about the voices in the recordings. Those biographies would provide more context and flesh out the perspectives I was hearing. I imagine at the opening the dancers would perform in the gallery while the video ran and viewers would try to take in both at once, looking to see where they lined up and whether it meant something different when they didn’t. And whether you attended on the day the dancers performed or not, after watching the video you’d move through the rest of the museum, musing over what you saw and finding new connections among the rest of the works on display.  

{Continuum – Bridging the Distance is free for all viewers, a gift from the artists to the audience during a difficult time. But if you enjoy the program and have the means, please consider donating to Seattle Dance Collective so that the show can go on again next summer.}