In the Kalamazoo arts community, March signifies a time to celebrate, explore, expand, and enjoy the radical endeavor of making and sharing dance. This year’s Midwest Regional Alternative Dance Festival, aka RADFest, hosted by Wellspring, gathered dance makers, students, and dance enthusiasts for four solid days of masterclasses, performances, films, celebrations and more.
It’s an annual, eagerly anticipated event, and this year’s kick-off Short Works Concert, the first of four, offered a host performance in homage to 83-year-old artist Claire Porter, longtime RADFest performer, a choreographer/comedienne who closed the show with one of her trademark comedic monologues blended with movement in her fourth and final appearance at RADFest.
“Fund Raiser” surprised the audience with what felt like a genuine interruption as Porter, dressed in a plaid skirt and jacket with an orange blouse and reader glasses around her neck, stumbled with her mic, apologizing for the interruption, like someone who walked in off the street.
“Ladies and gentlemen, can I have your attention, please,” she repeated throughout the performance. “We’re interrupting this program. . . .” With large hand gestures in a kind of stand-up satire of the relationship between fundraisers and potential patrons of the arts, she begs for donations, building in tension and exasperation as an unwitting audience ignores her tearful pleas, until she mutters “stingy” and “shits”, suggesting “you’re the victims of your own disregard”, coming down to the ground in a Burt Reynolds lying-down side stance, then getting back up effortlessly. A finale of baskets full of donations gliding onto the stage end the piece with her thanks by rote: “Thank you for your donations,” she said. “You make the difference.” The audience applauded wildly and gave her a standing ovation.
Six other dances preceded Porter’s finale, including one duet that also included spoken word, two solos, and three larger group dances, starting with RADFest host Wellspring’s reprise of “Woven Together”, a beautiful, lyrical piece that premiered at last year’s Fall Concert “Epic Moments" and showcases Elaine Unzicker’s original costumes, each flowing piece painstakingly made of stainless steel chainmail, link by link, specifically for each of the six dancers. The costumes inspired the music, Ordo Virtutum, Pt. IV by Hildegard Von Bingen, the finale of a Medieval opera, and the movement, from Marisa Bianan, driven by largesse: grand undulations that emerge from deep, wide second; big, swaying arms; and enormous lifts.
In “The Chosen One” an incredibly athletic dance from Alternative Motion Project, six dancers follow one who leads, like a puppet master; they raise her up, circle around her, repeat her movements running and turning. Full of balancing, lifting, piggybacking, running, audible breath, and a moving steamroller on the floor, it’s a riveting piece.
“silence (still) = death” from choreographer Rachel Stratton features four then five then six then seven dancers who emerge onto the stage, twirling, sliding, walking, leaping, mostly slowly in front of a magenta cyclorama as slow electric strings give way to big rock guitar chords. Looking like a gang of ‘90s street urchins, they squat jump and run in place; going nowhere, they fall down, get back up, then throw themselves down to the ground as a metaphor for the activists who fought radically against AIDS during a time when contracting HIV was a death sentence because an uncaring government took no action to save people’s lives.
Audrey Martel’s solo, “Flop”, set to Etta James’s “Fool That I Am”, provocatively embodies the experience of being foolish in love. She begins standing on the edge of an overhead spot light center stage, lit in red, bouncing and shaking, as if traumatized, then rolls, flips, flops, and balances on her upper back and shoulders, then one front shoulder, arm, and face. Her movement is measured and controlled to effectively present an honest sense of being out of control. It’s an utterly truthful performance.
Martel’s movements are almost fish-like, though it’s Gina Laurenzi who performs as if under the sea in her solo “[beneath]”. She writhes and rolls on the ground, waves her arms and legs, comes to kneel, then stands, and returns to the ground, performing to water sounds from Allen Russell and in front of projected images of a coral reef. Like the jellyfish behind her, she undulates and balances under very low light.
Almost as a reflection of Claire Porter’s work, Halie Bahr and Alexandra Barbier combine spoken word with singing, music, dance, and props in their strange and slightly comic “(#1 of ?)”. Beginning in silence, the duo, dressed in overalls, step backward with deliberation. At turns they sing and speak, wend themselves around a microphone stand and a chair, then use a roll of bubble wrap and bunting to wrap around themselves. “What happens if we touch it?” they say. They remove their overalls and shirts, leaving them on the ground as if stones in a stream and step onto them wearing their bathing suits. They make shapes with their bodies, but to what end?
As RADFest curator Jennifer Glaws said in her curtain speech, “We believe that making dance is radical.” RADFest, with its many offerings, validates and celebrates that radical act, in inviting artists to the stage, screen, and studio/classroom who push the boundaries of what dance can be and do. And we’re here for it.
17th Annual RADFest
Downtown Kalamazoo
March 5-8
https://wellspringdance.org/radabout
