Pat Graney sometimes calls herself the grandmother of Seattle’s contemporary dance scene. She’s been making performance here for more than 25 years, and many of this city’s well-known choreographers and performers have spent time dancing with Graney’s company: KT Niehoff, Amii Legendre, Peggy Piacenza, and Amy O’Neal, to name just a few. But few of Seattle’s younger dancemakers and dance fans have ever seen her most influential work. Which is why Graney decided to restage three of her dances together in a single program called The Faith Triptych. It was performed at On The Boards October 21-24, 2010.
When Graney created the dances Faith (1991), Sleep (1997), and Tattoo (2001), she didn’t envision them as three parts of a whole. Each work was premiered individually, toured nationally, then set aside while the choreographer pursued other projects. While Graney edited and reshaped each dance to make the evening a somewhat manageable three and a half hours long, the Faith Triptych is still monumental in scope, and a bit of an endurance test for the audience. My companion for the evening said it was a little bit like Wagner’s Ring Cycle: an epic world you enter willingly, then submit to for the duration. Unlike Wagner’s 17-hour tale of gods and greed, though, the three dances in Pat Graney’s Triptych present three ways to think about women: the sacred, the personal, and the savage.
Faith came out of Graney’s experiences as a Catholic schoolgirl. She was curious to know what it would be like to replace the many religious images of men with women. The piece begins with slow tableaux taken from the paintings of Caravaggio. The dancers, in short, tight velvet dresses, lean together, then languidly unfurl their arms, fingers of accusation pointed at an unseen Judas. The soft lighting (originally designed by Meg Fox and reimagined by Ben Geffen for this production) illuminates the women. They are sacred, but startling in these poses orginally designed for men. The pace is stately, lulling the viewer into Graney’s own ritual contemplation of the feminine.
But Graney doesn’t linger over-long in the Renaissance. The dancers reappear in filmy white tunics, red rubber balls in hand. To music by the Cocteau Twins, they dive onto the balls, rolling across them on their bellies, arching their backs into swanlike poses. They toss the balls to one another, catching them with hands and feet, then pulling them tenderly into a caress. As the last ball is thrown offstage, Amii Legendre emerges in a tight black dress carrying a pair of red high heels. She binds her feet with tape, then squeezes her feet into the shoes. Her fellow dancers appear, each with her own pair of red shoes. The women strut and pose, then one by one, each burts into frenzied movement, possessed by the demon shoes, perhaps an echo of the old Moira Shearer film.
Faith ends, almost as it began, with a return to the sacred. Gone are the shoes, the tight dresses, the red balls. The women are nude, their bodies sculpted by the soft lights as they move from pose to pose. Dona nobis pacem, the singer intones, and at “pacem”, each women raises her arm index finger extended. The image, like so many from this dance, is indelible.
Sleep, the program’s second work, has its own indelible images. But where Faith is about the sacred, Sleep is a chronicle of the personal. A small girl, in a white party dress, carries a birthday cake with lit candles, across a stage covered in a silky white cloth. She sets down her cake, then walks to the rear of the stage, lowers herself to the floor, and covers her legs with the cloth, ready for the performance to unfold.
What she watches is the story of a woman’s life, from girlhood, through marriage and childbirth, to death. The dancers evolve in front of our eyes, from white-clad, almost feral beings moving together across the stage, to frilly-socked step dancers in black patent leather Mary Jane shoes, trying to outdo one another in front of an audience. As Alison Cockrill dons her wedding finery, the other dancers move upstage to receive their own white gowns, which descend from some heavenly closet. Showered in torrents of traditional white rice, the women celebrate their passage to married life, but coyly lift the hems of their long dresses to reveal their Mary Janes, a reminder of their unfettered girlhoods.
The innocent little girl returns with her cake, to celebrate the weddings at a large table. The women array themselves behind it, part wedding feast, part Last Supper. Indeed, the festive table is transformed in time into a funereal byre, the silky white cloth into a shroud. Plaintive Irish melodies accompany this, the final stage of one woman’s journey through life. Pat Graney made significant changes to Sleep for this program. One jarring result are the choppy musical transitions, which distract from what’s happening onstage.
The last third of the Triptych, Tattoo, was less emotionally engaging than either of the two dances that preceded it. In this 2001 work, Graney takes us to Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Nude, decorated in full body black tattoos, the women stalk across a stage, decorated only with a pile of debris, like the dessicated bones of some long-dead animal. In unison, like a jungle gang of Jets, the dancers rumble across the stage in unison.
Tattoo is episodic in structure. While music by Ellen Fullman and Amy Denio is more gracefully arranged than Sleep’s score, it felt disjointed at times. Perhaps this was due to the editing Graney had to do to make the piece manageable for the evening’s bill, or perhaps it was her intent to present us a scenes in a series of snapshots. In the darkness between these scenes, taped voices float out to us, embodied only by an American Sign Language interpreter in a narrow spotlight. The full lights come up on Allison Cockrill, wearing a microphone headset and toting a small stepstool. She mutters almost incomprehensibly, climbs up the stool, then down. Why?
When Tattoo first premiered in 2001, much was made of Ellen Fullman’s black sound skirts. Cockrill, KT Neihoff and Sandra Fann take the stage this time in the stiff black dresses, wired so their every black-booted step is amplified into an eerie percussion. They stomp and twirl, to a mournful saxophone solo. Jazz for skirt and sax? It’s an arresting image, but what connects it to the primitive, tattooed women?
The dance, and Pat Graney’s true genius for imagery, culminates with an almost mystical sand drop. The dancers are seated on the floor, beneath a scrim of falling sand. Like mist, the sand partially obscures our vision, but creates a pearly halo around the women, who sweep the growing piles with their arms, fanning it across the dark stage floor. They rise and move across it, like dinosaurs roaming some long-ago wilderness, arid as the clean-picked pile of bones behind them. The lights go down, the last strains of music fade away, and the audience (what remains after significant attrition), is silent.
While Pat Graney didn’t choreograph her three dances as a triptych, taken together, the three dances were a fascinating journey into facets of femininity. But enormity of the project placed significant demands on the audience. Viewers have to slow ourselves to her pace, relinquish any 21st century demands for fast cuts or instant gratification. And despite intermissions between each of the dances, there isn’t really time to absorb all that Graney wants to say. By Tattoo, it’s all you can do to focus your eyes. But Pat Graney has a remarkable talent for creating tableaux and images that linger in your mind. Despite the exhaustion of the ordeal of watching her with you. This production, archived for On The Boards TV, felt like a monumental moment in dance history. Graney’s Faith, Sleep, and Tattoo onstage in a single evening offers a chance to see the evolution of ideas, the maturation of a choreographer. The dances, performed by some of the dancers who originated them, are as vivid as they were at their premiers, as profound, sometimes confounding, but ultimately provocative, beautiful and timeless.
