Seattle Dance Collective Produces A Headlamp Or Two

Seattle Dance Collective continues its second season with the third of five pieces, A Headlamp or Two by Beth Terwilleger. On July 16, this unusual dance premiered, like the rest of them, online. But although every piece in the program so far has made good use of location and format to create something different from you would see on a regular season stage, A Headlamp or Two felt like film first and dance second. Which, considering how rarely those two art forms play well together, was lovely.

Seattle Dance Collective

One of my highlights of last summer was the debut of Seattle Dance Collective, a new dance company founded by two of my favorite Pacific Northwest Ballet dancers. 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

The pandemic started when they were still in the early stages of developing Program Two. They nimbly adapted, shifting from the expected single live program to present 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 was masked and maintained distance.  

Beth Terwilleger

I was at least a little bit familiar with the choreographers of the first two pieces, Home and The Only Thing You See Now. I had seen Penny Saunders’ work as part of SDC’s Program One and SeaPertls had a piece in PNB’s Locally Sourced program last fall. But Beth Terwilleger was completely new to me. She has a ballet background, but it looks like she mostly works in the contemporary dance space these days, with connections to Velocity Dance and her own fledgling company the gray. “Contemporary rooted in ballet” seems like a pretty good description of what she contributed to Bridging the Distance.  

A Headlamp or Two

Choreography: Beth Terwilleger
Dancers: Stephan Bourgond and Lucien Postlewaite
Music: Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata

Sometimes finding absurdity and humor while dealing with excruciating emotional pain is the only way to cope. Sometimes one needs to find laughter in order to be able to find a path to emotional healing. And sometimes a good headlamp is all one needs.

The Players

I was unfamiliar with Terwilleger, but the team on this piece were all well-acquainted. The choreographer and PNB dancer Lucien Postlewaite have known each other since childhood. Postlewaite’s partner, Stephan Bourgond, formerly danced for Ballets de Monte Carlo. So did Postlewaite and SDC founder Noelani Pantastico.

The Music

As soon as we hit play, my husband said, “Oh, it’s that song.” We had to wait for the credits to identify it by name, but Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata is very familiar music. I’m pretty sure I’ve even seen other ballets set to this same music. At first the lovely but cliché music seemed like a strange choice. But in the Making Of video, Terwilleger talked about music as the familiar ground that makes people feel comfortable moving into the new territory of an unfamiliar art form like dance. And the movement in A Headlamp or Two was certainly the terra incognita to the safety and comfort of the music.

Watch A Headlamp or Two below, on the SDC website, or on Vimeo.

A HEADLAMP OR TWO by Beth Terwilleger from Seattle Dance Collective on Vimeo.

The Movement

Usually, I have some point of reference. Even when I see a new choreographer, I can say, ‘oh, they did this thing like in that other ballet,’ or ‘this part reminded me of that thing.’ But Terwilleger had a completely different vocabulary from anything I’m familiar with. There was a lot of crawling around on the ground (Postlewaite’s white sweats got filthy). There was a lot of melting downwards and inwards. (The slow drop from a one-handed push-up sparked a lot of conversation, and an impromptu workout in my household.) But the depressive moping was energized by a lot of lunging, exaggerated hip thrusts, and some bouncing around that looked more like toddler’s temper tantrum than ballet.

Terwilleger herself once referred to the movements as “weird” in the behind the scenes video, and I have to agree. It was weird. And also captivating. And confusing. I couldn’t really decide if I liked it. I watched it over and over again trying to make up my mind.

The Magic of Cinema

Postlewaite, accessorized with neoprene booties and a bright red lip, and Bourgond in the same but with a black dress, performed mostly identical choreography. But they didn’t perform together. Instead, they performed in two separate locations, layered over each other like palimpsests in the film. Sometimes one or the other would disappear or come to the forefront, but often they were equally transparent layers. Film maker Henry Wurtz has done beautiful work on all the pieces in the program so far but deserves a shout out here because A Headlamp or Two stands out particularly as a work of film, rather than a well-filmed dance.

What Headlamp?

Without a lot of background on the creator’s intent, it’s almost impossible to interpret any new art that comes out these days through any lens but pandemic. All the low, melty stuff was certainly depressive. However different it looked, it felt immediately familiar to anyone who has had days during the lockdown when getting up from the couch to accomplish anything felt like a Herculean effort. (I am 95% certain that’s everyone.) Likewise, the more energetic parts of the dance looked like the that feeling of inner frustration when you just can’t stand to be inside these four walls for one more minute – but there’s no place to go. Both could have been histrionic, but the slow pace of the Sonata lends the whole thing a level of dignity and grace that we all deserve but rarely accomplish.

I’ve called my Petzl one of the best gifts my husband ever bought me, so I get that sometimes a good headlamp is all one needs. But I’m not really sure how headlamps figure into the ballet. If the story is one of pain and frustration, maybe the headlamp is how you find the way out?

 Location

Going back to the dancers being together on film in different physical spaces. Even more than the familiar music, the specific physical locations were a point of connection for my family. They filmed in the skate park and dirt bike tracks at Lower Woodland Park. It’s very close to our house. In the behind the scenes video, all their gear is lined up on the sideline of the adjacent soccer field, at the exact spot where my daughter’s soccer team took their photo at the end of their last spring game. We recognized the graffiti. We had tried to capture that same light effect of the sun spreading out in fan-like rays through the branches of the conifers behind the track. Somehow, those details made A Headlamp or Two feel like our ballet, even if we had nothing to do with it and didn’t quite get it.

{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.}