In Leaves
When Tiina Harris met her 94-year-old Estonian great-grandmother for the first time, the great-grandmother looked carefully at her and said, “You are the first one who looks like me.” Although we tend to think about looking back at our ancestors, illuminating the past in search of our origins, it’s also likely that our ancestors looked forward into the blinding light of the future to see us. They hoped, perhaps, to find themselves re-created. These connections, backward and forward in time, form the subject of the five dances in a concert by four choreographers, “In Leaves.”
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The choreographers called their work “dance stories.” And while dance was the central element, it wasn’t always the most powerful one: the choreographers also used family photos, old family films, live musicians, notes and biographies in the program, spoken texts, and an installation in the entry that included letters, photos, and mementos. Overlapping stories were what gave this evening its texture and unity.
Tiina Harris’s story is the most dramatic. Her Estonian grandparents met at a dance in a small village. He approached her because she was short and they would dance well together. She paid attention to him because he was a good dancer; she didn’t even talk to him until they went for a walk in the woods after the dance. He didn’t tell her his real name until their third meeting. They confess in a taped interview that they slept together before they were married; their baby was Harris’s mother. Six months after they married, the Soviet Union invaded Estonia, and Edgar was forced to join the Soviet army. When the Germans invaded, he surrendered and spent a year as a prisoner of war. He was reunited with his wife and daughter, but when the Soviet army retook Estonia, all three fled to Germany, then to rural Michigan.
The remaining two dances were enjoyable but didn’t touch the evening’s themes as deeply. Amy Alyn Pope’s solo Here, Here, Absent is a meditation on the seductiveness of sadness. Pope stays in the middle of the stage in a clearing in the leaves. The floor seems to be exerting an extra amount of gravity because she keeps being pulled down. A burst of anger enlivens her and she seems to sail above the floor, but then the anger passes and she’s sucked down again. An improvisation by Carter and Sheldon B. Smith called Philadelphia Duet is filled with Smith’s quirky humor.
