This Beach Used to be a Dance Hall
THIS BEACH USED TO BE A DANCE HALL is an experimental dance/theater piece regarding the sea. Using a process derived from water-based patterns in nature – waves breaking on sand, waves breaking on rocks, rising waters, flocking seagulls, rising tides, drifting sand – combined with an alien text telling a story of three drowned women in a made-up language (we’re calling it Whalish), the performance sets a contemplation of the pleasures of watching the water against the violence of our past, present, and future with regards to the likelihood that we’ll be under that water soon enough.
If you sit and stare long enough at the water, if you commit to the activity of waiting long enough, it is said you might have a sublime encounter - or, people have, it is said. Something about the crashing of waves on the sand. The repeated impact of nature, the unrelenting, the act of watching a thing throw itself against another thing over a long period of time. This is what they say might happen: that within the waves, you will see dancers. Because before the oceans rose, before the ice caps melted, before you were born, this beach used to be a dance hall. So - maybe the waves, the thing you see before you see dancers, is indicated by formalism (ballet-based, so to speak), a movement vocabulary jumping off point that will then be set outdoors, something to be rain-soaked and sun-baked until it disintegrates into something more haunting, human, organic. It is how it feels be be underwater for a very long time, your lungs might explode, water pressure building around you, pushing inwards as you use all your muscles to push outwards; or, in a more pedestrian setting, the same feeling but applied to walking down the street awash with pain, failure, daily trials, and the task is to simply take a deep breath. It's movement that explores the internal breathlessness and unrelenting pressure and force, and then explodes outward. And then repeats. And repeats and repeats and repeats.
THIS BEACH USED TO BE A DANCE HALL
Choreography & Direction by Katie Rose McLaughlin
Text by Dan O’Neil
Sound Design by Gavin Price
Featuring performances Brighid Greene, Mary Kate Sickel & Emily Pacilio
Developed at The Barn Arts Collective in a 2015 & 2016 artist’s residency and a showing at the Center for Performance Research’s Performance Studio Open House in 2016.