April 2, 2009
Watching the solidly-built man struggle with the listing female bodies on stage - both stiff as planks of alder - I felt as though I were being transported back to the beginning of time. Grabbing his Makita power drill as if it were Prometheus’ flame, he quickly goes to work injecting life to their limbs, extremities, and beautiful faces. Are these Eves being created from Adam’s rib? The children of Cadmus sprouting from seeds of the slain dragon’s teeth?
The tragedy surrounding Construct – this joyful, strident, and occasionally haunting work – is the death of its choreographer so shortly after its making. German-born Tanja Liedtke, only 29 years of age, was killed in an accident in 2007. This Seattle production, overseen by creative coordinator and former collaborator Solon Ulbrich, will be the only one in North America. It is a bitter irony that a young artist so fascinated with origins, instinct, and the act of creation would have left us so prematurely.
Liedtke dramatizes the artistic process by establishing creation myths transfigured and articulated by the familiar human impulse to build complex structures and realities. And looking around the stage, one sees the assorted goods of a Home Depot purchase: thin wooden boards, saw-horses, aluminum ladders, extension cords, Astroturf, and packing tape. Integrated into the terse and ultimately lyrical movement, they are the components of a narrative, an evolution if you will, set to a musical score by DJ TR!P that suggests the pounding of hammers and the jangle of a sack of nails. As the trio goes about the business of living, they gradually assemble and take apart an infrastructure that both protects and defines them. The effect of these constructions upon their own interactions is richly varied, evoking at turns pleasure, confusion, sadness, and rage. The women take on a variety of iconic roles throughout the piece, appearing and reappearing as muses, lovers, wives, and daughters before slipping back into its flow and rhythm the movement.
The tone of Construct is hard to fathom at first, with its shifts from representational imagery to more abstract modes of expression. But the integration of its layers – the living, the loving, the building, the creation of art – is masterful once we see it all formed; the range of predicaments and outcomes broad in scope.
The exuberance and romantic charge of the piece’s modern, hip-hop inflected movement is tempered at the end, however, by a final, cautionary image. A stationary woman slowly disappears behind a lattice of softwood planks stacked around her by the man who once held the magic, life-giving drill. In life, as in art, the forces that give can also take back at any time.
