...What’s really going on is all inside our heads, in the transformation of arbitrary detail into meaning, the exploration of how memories lodge in our minds and eventually take on personal resonance. For example, how does an image of God’s hands, starting out as big goofy Mickey Mouse-like hands attached to an unremarkable naked guy change from being completely silly to being a symbol for the creative spark that gives something like a dance performance life and an image that gives you goosebumps?
...Punning, lexical stopgaps, and rhyming riffs that match rhyming patterns of movement give the choreography its head. Sonya and Layla’s collaborative planning is repeated and dramatized in a French-style film that is shown—which, in its café-time pacing, serves to establish the work’s overall rhythmic structure. God is introduced as an idea and then as a nude boy with giant hand mitts whose movements are at once imperious and amateurish—retro hand chairs are also utilized as metonymic props which seem to imply the transferability of divinity....
...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.....
Last weekend we had robbinschilds up for a residency in the studio where they were busy working on the festival opener for July 11th, Sonya and Layla Go Camping....