The ends of love - Dance Drama

The Ends of love is a dance drama commissioned by the the Stuat Pimsler Dance & Theater group. Staged at The Ritz, across the Mississippi, on University & 13th Ave NE, what amused me to start with was the composition of the audience. With the exception of me, it was all white. And there were two distinct age groups in there. One, college students. And the other, elderly people. You could count the number the people between ages 25 to 45 on your fingers.

Having said that, the performers were actually a wonderful mix of people - mostly white, but it did have a couple black artists, & a Brazilian. The story, if you do not follow the theater scene to all its nuances, is broadly about the various aspects of being in & out of love - rejection, possession, tiffs, battle-of-the-sexes & all such ways that love manifests in. Nothing all that new there. What really made the show worth the time & money (22 USD, general seating), were the dances, & the trifle arrhythmic & somehow still temporal music.

If you're interested in the aesthetics of human movement, you'll not be disappointed. Some of the movements were absolutely feline, some a byword on levitation, a reversals of roles where women carried the men, a climbing upon some two silken apparels that hung from the ceiling, tangling & disentangling, & then a fall back to the stage - with the two strands of silken apparel twining around the falling man.

The separation of men & women & the futile attempts to become again a part of a cogent whole was probably the best piece of the show. It goes from a classic one man show to a frenzy of arms, legs & bodies- together but not united; they each had their own singular focus, they all moved together, they all moved the same way but they could not form a communion - & the consequent pain of not being part of a more meaningful whole came across wonderfully.

It is a very difficult medium to tell a story, & my own cultural distance made it even more difficult to grab the nuances; however, the wonderful thing about all of this is that across the world the broad commonalities of expression & feeling are about the same - & a dance, more than text, falls back on such shared & very basic commonalities.