perserverance

inkBoat and AXIS dancers

In Limbo, Odd Nerdrom

Over the weekend, I saw ODD, a bracing collaboration between two dance companies (Shinichi Iova-Koga's inkBoat, and Oakland's physically integrated AXIS Dance Company), and cellist/composer Joan Jeanrenaud, inspired by the mythic, figurative work of Norwegian painter Odd Nerdrom. I was struck by the commitment to move, to express, to interact; how the use of internal and external propulsion looked from the outside, and what it "accomplished"; and by the dynamic, vital springboard of stillness. Sheer will to take space; perhaps not ironically, the "disabled," wheelchair-bound AXIS dancers telegraphed a strength and ferocious vitality that held and propelled them. inkBoat's contorting, convulsing motions carried them to the other shore, as it were, without consideration of elegance or conventional notions of prettiness. The routes were indirect and inefficient in the directional dimension only; the fuel was potent, true, unrelenting; the encounters between "abled" and "disabled" dancers were dynamic, brisk, startlingly crucial. And the stillness between gestures--Iova-Koga refers to them as "suspensions, holding points between actions..."--were "... alive, ripe for change and development." The Pause Presence, in the Soul Motion lexicon.

ODD moves to the Malonga Casquelourd Center for the Arts, 1428 Alice Street, Oakland, CA 94612 for another weekend of performances Friday and Saturday November 12 and 13, with an afternoon show Sunday the 14th at 2:00pm. Tickets here.