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Sonya and Layla Go Camping 
(performed by robbinschilds at MTA on July 11, 2009)

There are a lot of different aspects of this piece to write about, so I’m not going to try to write about all of them. I will just write about a few aspects of the performance that I found especially interesting. As a choreographer, I often watch dance shows on a really formalistic level: what material do the choreographers use and how do they use it? One of the interesting things about Sonya and Layla Go Camping is the way that they use a small amount of material, but they recycle their material in such a way so that it seems like they actually have an abundance of material.

Toward the beginning of the performance, the stage is bare except for two tents, and Layla and Sonya discuss the performance as if they were two collaborators creating a performance—which, in fact, they are. Their dialogue does create a performance, or perhaps multiple performances, so that you become a witness to a number of virtual performances in your imagination, which they conjure up with their words. You can’t quite tell if the dialogue is scripted or not, but it seems like a spontaneous conversation about what the performance could be. Later in the piece, when the exact same dialogue is used, you reflect back and realize that the opening was in fact scripted, so that everything that you’ve already seen alters a bit in your mind. This time, the dialogue is recognizable, but it’s also completely new because it is re-told in a different medium (film), and in a different language (French), and because your state of knowledge is different: you know that it’s scripted and you know what line is coming next.

The dance vocabulary is recycled in a similar way to the dialogue. It is repeated in various sections throughout the piece, but each time it is repeated in a slightly different manner so that you recognize something different about it. The first time you see certain movements, they are associated with certain phrases that Layla and Sonya speak: “God’s hands,” or “wet your pants,” or “do that glance.” Later in the performance, when the dance vocabulary is repeated without language, you remember all of the associations of the spoken phrases, so that the now-wordless dance is imbued with meanings that you recognize. This is something that is difficult to achieve in a dance work, since movement, unlike language, does not carry a codified meaning, and so it is difficult to create meaning and recognition by using movement. I think this is something they are able to achieve through their reduced vocabulary and their way of re-using it and recycling it in new ways, with new configurations of dancers, so that new meanings are constantly being generated. In this way, it is a very ecological piece, employing the motto of “reduce, re-use, and recycle”…using reduced means to create rich results.

Daniel Linehan is a dancer and choreographer who worked in New York for four years and who has been in Brussels for the past year studying in the Research Cycle at PARTS. He is the boyfriend of a member of the cast, so admittedly a bit biased.