Zoe Scofield and Juniper Shuey’s most recent work, the devil you know is better than the devil you don’t, performed this past weekend at On the Boards, is a major breakthrough for what is widely regarded as Seattle’s most important modern dance company. The choreographer/designer team and their company may have presented Seattle with its most technique-driven and intensely expressive original dance in recent years, but with the devil you know they have approached a new and uncompromising level of clarity and fierceness.
What is most striking about devil is the amount of energy it holds and accumulates with its mostly spare, minimalist movement. But what is more astonishing about the piece is how the scarcity of physical contact between the dancers heightens, rather than diminishes its drama. How is this possible? Scofield and Shuey are able to lift our sensory experience beyond the body into a realm that is at once spiritual and ontological. It is a place where contemporary dance - and Western art in general - rarely finds itself. The dancers are so completely at home here, they leave behind no trace of concept or idea for us to cling to once it is over.
Devil begins in darkness with a glowing spectre of a dancer projected against a scrim. The ghostly figure moves across the stage under a flurry of falling snow and we are suddenly overcome by the sense that we are floating upwards. Soon the vision departs and in the dim light we can discern real dancers standing behind the opaque wall. One of them emerges from the formation and turns forward. As she freezes and looks towards us we see furtive, phantom-like projections pulse out from her body across the screen like surges of electrical current. This surreal and riveting introduction establishes a dualism that the piece will slowly erode and ultimately overturn.
Scofield’s movement, so deliberative and halting at first, is spurred on by Morgan Henderson’s deep and varied musical composition until it gains a considerable degree of heat. The crunching, percussive sounds that we hear at the outset give way to trance-inducing rhythms and soaring, repetitious melodies. We are treated to the jaunty keys of a vibraphone, the spare chords of an open-tuned electric guitar, then the dark, sinister tones of a bass clarinet. Jazzy passages turn meditative, then hurried, and bounce back again, but the dancers resist its pull, their poses alternately anguished, surprised, or contemplative.
Throughout the duration of the performance, we appear to be witnessing the presence of a powerful, uncontrollable force breaking through its surface. It is not the intense human emotion that lays beneath so much successful choreography, but instead a heightened awareness of something greater than us. There is a feeling of waking from the stupor of our daily lives and suddenly finding ourselves conscious of the world around us.
Behind the minimalism of Scofield’s movement and the discreet framing of Shuey’s stagecraft is a passionate asceticism. Even the curious intimacy of the duet that takes place in the second half (with dancers Ezra Dickinson and Alison Van Dyke) seems to suggest how people are capable of inserting themselves into each other’s consciousness rather than their emotional connectedness. The devil you know is about the human struggle to access a transcendent state of being and the uncertain fallout.
Before the dramatic and brightly-lit final and its murkier aftermath, we see a projected silhouette of Shiva that slowly disintegrates into a series of crouched, fleeing bodies that exit across the screen. It may be a metaphor for the process this work represents, but which known devil are we dancing with here anyway? Is it the physical, sensual one or the other that dwells beyond it?
