DANCEMAKERS

ROSÉ PORN

Rosé Porn, like a bottle of fancy hybridian (is that a word?) wine, races, wanders and languorously lulls one’s sensibilities across an open stage and invites an audience to take part in dance icon exploding yoga-like theatrics that question the boundaries between daily movement, social interaction, and a complex yet casual approach to dance phrasing. 

Zoja Smutny’s (Dancemaker’s current resident artist) choreography takes on a kind of nineteen sixties happening effect as spectators are asked to comfortably, flexibly, and freely pose prostrate on the floor of a large studio space in the historic distillery district. Two dancers and one singer  (there may have been more but I was flat on my back or hiding in the shadows) wander throughout the space and contribute to a mild dance party atmosphere as movement subtly interacts with people standing or sitting throughout the playing space.

Smutny’s presence as one of the dancers reaches an enriching peak as she performs a series of reiterative, manic staccato-like arm and body movements facing a wall – her sharp edged shadow echoing the diligence and repetition her approach to dance embodies. She explodes traditional notions of what dance is and what it can be, and by inviting spectators, at the outset, to simply lie down, take part, wander, dance about – she gives us the opportunity to explore our own physical phrasing, continuity – what have you - as we inhabit our own bodies and all the bodies that surround us. Sex is definitely a subtext here, but it is an unobtrusive spiritually open subtext as a form of physical narrative, desire and intuitive foreplay that examines so many levels of sight and sound in an hour long program that one leaves with a fine sense of love and bewilderment and a longing for some quietly thrilling fabled disco at the end of the rainbow to magically unfold. Placing flowers at frequent intervals in the middle of the playing space invites decorative longing and a desire for beauty, tra la…

The repetition – by the dancers – of one-liners from songs is a refreshing comical and luxurious cajoling of our sense of memory, and a nostalgia for the present, past, and future of our individual corporeal longings. In Smutny’s choreography we subtly crave everything we have and have not experienced as Rosé Porn – without obvious narrative meaning and definition, yet constantly flirting with love’s story  - delineates and describes the ways in which dance, movement, life, lying down and letting it all wash over us can be a very pure and very satisfying art form – and how the walls we break between art artist spectator dance theatre and a room full of complicit unsuspecting partygoers can become us…

ROSÉ PORN WAS PRESENTED IN THE DISTILLERY DISTRICT FROM NOVEMBER 5TH UNTIL NOVEMBER 7TH