This piece is quite different comparing to Big Ape's other repertory work in the way that it doesn't have an obvious drive as the piece progresses. It maintains a specific pace throughout and at times almost hints a termination of momentum or energy, but then it picks up and keeps going...in a cycle. The work was made in pieces and usually you would imagine sections start to interweave and have meanings being done one after another. But "Away" kind of maintains that "sectionalism" in a way, pieces held close to each other only because of some inevitability of the bigger structure. I am still making sense of the work. It almost feels like it should just crumble and complete fall apart and be "disposed" at the end, somehow. How do you dispose a piece?
I was getting on the T to get back to my temporary "home" in Boston and had a rather inspiring conversation with one of the audience members about what is "modern dance." haha, of course right? what is modern dance, then, and now, and how's it changing, how's it dying. Maybe we can wrap all that has happened since the 20s until now and call it modern dance, and call what is yet to come something else? So many dance works have shifted to something close to our concepts of "experimental theater." But that seems to me only a way to escape thinking about what is the kind of work that we don't consider dance now? Why? Can we categorize them in more specific and informed ways than one large "easy-to-go" category of experimental theater? of course, i think modern dance pieces still need to be movement-based to be called dance. Theatricality is one of the ways to say what you wanna say, but i do think only if the movement itself makes a statement that a piece can be a dance. It seems to me so interesting that each audience member has a "line" through which they judge/ or categorize whether a piece is "dance" or not.
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