Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Last Meadow
09/04/09 6:30 p.m.
posted by: Allison Halter
I suppose I am jumping in a little late in the game here – there have already been so many entries about this specific piece – so I will just give my impressions and ask a few questions that I feel Last Meadow raised.
I will admit to describing this piece to friends as “kind of like my modern dance nightmare,” and the experience of watching it (at some points) as “a rave cave, like being in a k-hole, or a live version of a filmed bad drug trip scene.” The language in Last Meadow was often distorted or layered, so much so as to be unintelligible. I kept waiting for it to resolve into something.
And it did, in a fairly surprising way. The cast began singing an a cappella choral arrangement of Madonna’s “Physical Attraction.” It was strangely moving and beautiful, a place of respite in the deluge, but I wondered if it was just that my pop sensibilities being played up to at last.
It happened again, at the climax of the piece, which started out as a series of dance exercises which grew more and more manic. Dancers stripped out of their clothes, and finally began what felt like an ecstatic dance (to another Madonna song, “Jump”). They came out into the audience, ran through the aisles, walked on top of seats, and I actually saw members of the audience bopping their heads. Was it just the unstoppable force of Madonna’s cultural currency?
Why is the language of so much modern dance so impenetrable? I know that this question may seem like it betrays my ignorance; I am not a trained dancer, nor am I a person who attends modern dance performances regularly. But I am an artist with a physical practice, and a person who just loves to dance. I understand that this kind of question gets asked of much contemporary art, and yet I still feel compelled to ask it, as a semi-insider (whatever that means), a sympathetic maker, what makes modern dance so hard to get?
