Langberg And Sherman. Three of Which Are Under Construction
by J. H. Lue Choy
This piece is sponsored by Springboard for the Arts
SOLO is the culminating showcase every 2 years of solo works commissioned by the six most recent McKnight Dance Fellows. This is an account of 2017 Dance fellow Krista Langberg’s work with Choregrapher (and 2006/2013 McKnight Choreography fellow) Karen Sherman, alongside many other collaborators, entitled “Three of Which are Under Construction”.
Langberg starts the dance over the course of intermission. I didn’t see how the set up happened, but upon returning to the theatre, there was a pink carpet (torn up from Krista’s home) on the stage where she is warming up, with an added line of chairs on stage, seats filled by people important throughout the last 10 years of her life, secret performers hidden as an extra audience to her preparation ritual.
Sherman and Langberg actively break the structure which SOLO prescribes, of developing a piece through a choreographer/dancer dynamic to show Krista’s abilities as a “hotshot dancer”, nor were they interested in the solo prescription itself. Instead, they aimed to bring to stage a portrait that was representative and incorporative of Krista’s real, total life rather than just her achievements as a dancer.
While much of the early process leading to the piece was the two doing table-work, discussing their non-wants and specificities of personal history, the rehearsals resulting from these talks also brought other people in the room. These colleagues and family of Langberg lent another layer of intimacy to the work through their interpersonal histories with Langberg living on stage, helping in achieving the works goal of highlighting the virtuosity of daily life. While not necessarily visible to the audience, the existing performer-to-performer score of active listening by these participants was important in holding the exchange of energies within the work.
The theatre fades from intermission to performance as the ritual comes to a close. This change is punctuated by the start of a section framed by the voices of Krista, her onlookers, and a recording, also Krista’s voice. The “audience members” present on stage ask questions of, and respond to the recorded dialogue, as Krista spends time around the carpet and single chair that isn’t part of the downstage left lineup, seemingly listening over the conversation her voice over is having with the other participants. Her movement here is a sparse vocabulary of walking, stopping, and head inclinations, feeling like a slow unravelling from her warm up. In the midst of this, Langberg begins responding and overlapping with her voiceover, differently recalling the experiences as she eats a banana, whose peel is later passed off to those audiencing, alongside her glasses and water bottle.
This fades into the voiceover’s text about Krista noticing the reoccuring happenings of her therapists office, her vocal responses slowly pitter out and she begins miming her memory using the chair previously unoccupied near the carpet, evoking the door and desk of that office. The key moment of this remembering seems to be the reset that happens for the therapist between her clients, as Krista goes through the motions of emotional restabilization after hearing the traumas of a patient, before sitting down in the chair as a “ready”.
This triggers the next section of the piece, the edges of the carpet are ripped up, the stage audience making an exit, the first and second go individually before the remaining exit en masse. This picks up into a long section of phrasework, with former “audience” members Chris Schlichting, Mary-Ann Bradley and Tristan Koepke grouping behind the upstage left curtain to form the band Clean Stain. This phrase Karen described as having developed a phrase based off of Krista’s writings from 6-7 years ago, then teaching it to her with the allowance to take liberties. While there were some thoughts of Sherman’s part of touch/attack, timing,etc. Krista had the authority to make other choices.This stream of movement with off-kilter musicality is occasionally punctuated by moments pressed against the upstage wall, the band interrupted by a loud electric buzzing, before picking back into the phrase with sound starting back from where it left off.
Through the process, Krista inquired the direct source of individual moves sourced back to individual parts of the writing on an interest-to-know basis. This transfer of knowledge manifests in stage in the section following the long phrasal movement, after the band is revealed from behind their upstage left curtain, and oncomes a cacophony of events leading to the end of the piece. As the band continues playing and Krista starts the phrase again, the carpet midstage is spun around while Krista’s older daughter walks their dog on and back off the stage. Jane Shockley enters to question Krista about the moves, with score prompting her to answer however she wants (with truth, with a lie, not knowing, etc.). Krista next, as this stage cluttering is still in full swing, starts picking up the pillows from the line of chairs on stage, and throwing them at the back wall, this acting as a Foley action for Zaiga Chance smashing plates into a closed drawer downstage right.
This last section builds on itself at a much quicker rate than the rest of the piece, reaching a very defined energetic climax, before an abrupt moment of end, calling back to the banana moment from the beginning of the work, and a blackout. Seeing something at SOLO that wasn’t a solo excited me. Seeing a solo that broke away from SOLO’s structure of serving a virtuoustic, finished piece ready for consumption excited me. I was also excited to see the more training/process (respectively) focused work of the other 2017 collaboration Johnson/Willis, and 2016 collab Vairavan/Otake. Having seen the two work together in the context of Sherman’s Soft Goods (2016), it was exciting to see a deepened connection of an already existing collaboration in the evening. I look forward to seeing more from both.
J. H. Lue Choy (they/them/she/her) is an interdisciplinary movement/sound artist. Their work prioritizes the experiences of historically oppressed groups, especially people of colour and trans folx.
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