On Sunday, August 18, 2024, Space_LA presented a dynamic and wide-ranging inaugural concert of Performance Lab at the L.A. Dance Project studio. The program featured works by The Seaweed Sisters, Matilda Sakamoto, HEAVY BOOTS, Steph Dai, Jessie Lee Throne, and special guest artists Laja Field & Victor Rottier. Produced by Jessie Lee Throne, this was an ideal venue for both the artists and the audience offering quality production values as well as placing it in an informal setting.
The Seaweed Sisters in “Ready, Set, Awooga!” – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
Always entertaining, The Seaweed Sisters, Megan Lawson, Jillian Meyers, Dana Wilson entered dressed in green, blue and pink light raincoats with matching bathing caps. They began their work, Ready, Set, Awooga!, taping off a trapezoid shaped area in the space with masking tape that matched their colors, all while quietly singing, making verbal sounds and comedic faces at the audience. This was followed by the three artists creating small squares where they eventually stood in, and with the help of three audience members murder scene outlines of their bodies.
To rid themselves of the rolls of tape, the three challenged each other to see who could roll theirs offstage and hit the side brick wall. All were winners.
When the music by Mura Masa came on, the “sisters” acted out the words with great humor, originality and musicality. For Queens’ Five Alarm Funk they removed their raincoats to reveal jackets with a brightly colored floral design. Here, The Seaweed Sisters performed a tasteful satire on and homage to the hip hop music genre. As their program note stated, fun was had by all.
Mathilda Sakamoto in “Dancing is Embarrassing” – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
Matilda Sakamoto wrote in the program that she “is existing. Mainly in Los Angeles and New York” and her work Dancing is Embarrassing indeed proved to be dark humor with herself as the target. The audience never got a chance to see Sakamoto’s face or, for that matter, much of her body as she was discovered underneath several floral patterned bed sheets, with only her two feet and hands ever being exposed.
Sakamoto was speaking into a microphone while underneath the bedding and some of her text words were unclear, but she hit the target with all her punchlines. At one point she was wandering toward stage left when she asked, “Am I close to the fan?” The audience roared because the fan was placed on the far edge of stage right.
Dancing is Embarrassing was an intriguing work and the audience loved it. I only wish that the sound were clearer as at times I felt left out of the important descriptions.
Dancing is Embarrassing was performed by Matilda Sakamoto. The ocean. Fabric. Microphone. The music was ocean sounds and guitar by Gabe Schnider.
Screenshot from “Spineless Window” by Heavy Boots – courtesy of the artists.
The next piece was a film titled Spineless Window Frame by the dance theatre and film production company HEAVY BOOTS, Co-creator, Choreographer Layne Paradis Willis and Co-creator, Directory of Photography Anna Tse. The work included eight amazingly strong dance artists performing very athletic and high impact movements. Often two performers’ arms became a place for another to hang over limply, only to be unceremoniously dropped like dead meat. The sound score by Chris Tse featuring Cellist Lily Gelfand included sirens that caused me to have a sense that I was watching a tragedy or a scene from a catastrophe. This became especially relevant as one by one people were dropped into a pile of lifeless bodies as the camera slowly closed in.
Spineless Window Frame was performed by Jennifer Lacy, Hvrmony Adams, Devin Waxman, Chandler Davids, Jeremy Coachman, Isabella Coso, Marirosa Crawford, Baylie Olsen, and Jessie Lee Thorne. The Lighting Designer was Caleb Wilman; Rehearsal Director: Jessie Lee Thorne; and it was filmed at L.A. Dance Project.
Stephanie Dai in “Uretchko” – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
Uretchko, created and beautifully performed by Steph Dai, was a mysterious work that, as Agatha Christie’s character Hercule Poirot would say, activated the little gray cells. Dai states in the program that she is a lover of truth, beauty, and creation. I could be way off but as she unknotted her extremely nimble body and began the attempt of standing erect and walking, I had the sense that I was witnessing the creation and development of a living creature. Whatever the work meant to Dai, it was extremely personal and internalized.
The music for Uretchko was “Hou Wu” by Yijing Cai
Veil of Voices choreographed and performed brilliantly by Jessie Lee Thorne was an intense dance theater piece performed to live music by composer, celloist Max Judelson and spoken word written and performed by Seth “Hobbes” Origitano.
“Read me a story” was the phrase that kept repeating and Thorne, seated at a table piled with books, struggled throughout to find her own story already written. The struggle was not truly successful as we all are unique, but I was left with a sense that the character was never able to be seen by others as she saw herself. The text revealed what many feel, that internally we are a multitude of personae and perhaps some of them are even unbeknownst to ourselves.
Thorne’s performance was as intense as her work and a high point was when she was dancing around in front of the table with a book attached to and hiding her face. It spoke volumes.
Victor Rottier and Laja Field in “Splitting Image” – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
Laja Field and Victor Rottier met and worked together in Europe and traveled to Los Angeles to be part of the Performance Lab. Their duet, Splitting Image was a physical and sometimes verbal conversation with a movement vocabulary filled with incredible athleticism that left me feeling wonderfully exhausted. One of them was standing idle one moment and without notice suddenly executing an amazing street dance inspired movement that covered the entire space. Two solos erupted into a traveling, tumbling, and spinning duet that somehow they managed to perform in nearly perfect unison.
From what Field and Rottier said following their duet, Splitting Image as fusing of two ideas, but what I walked away with was wow, what physicality!
The music for Splitting Image was Break Free by Queen, Theory of the Machines by Ben Frost, Original Soundtrack by Martin Durov.
The Performance Lab Culmination Piece by Laja Field and Victor Rottier – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
As Field and Rottier were ending their talk, dancers in Free Reign began to slowly enter from down left. The group kept growing until it reached a total of seventeen performers. The work was the culmination of a six day workshop/performance lab at LADP and if I needed a simple phrase to describe it, it would be organized chaos.
There were duets, trios, quartets and larger groups that seamlessly interwoven into a truly magical dance experience. One could see Field and Rottier’s movement style within the work, but there were seventeen very diverse body types and personalities that made their put their own stamp on the work. Within this incredibly busy and dynamic piece, Field, Rottier and the performers managed to find moments of stillness. It was a great closer to an incredible evening of dance.
Free Reign was performed by Elena Dalla Torre, Dahyun Kim, Kailin Metz, Colin Harabedian, Mayra Borragan, Frankie Henderson, Sky Pasqual, Tiersha Lin, Jasmine Born, Chloe Swoiskin, Anna Kazwell, Kelsey Boyle, Riley Haley, Juniper Dorado, Isabella Vik, Cassy Clark, and Maya Bhavsar. The music was Original Sountrack by Martin Durov with the samples of Edith Piaf’s La Vie En Rose and Killing them Softly, Ascent by Neil Cowley and Ben Lukas Boysen.
This was the first showcase of the Performance Lab and I hope that it will be followed by a multitude of others. Thank you Space_LA and Jessie Lee Thorne. More please!
For more information about Space_LA, please visit their website.
For more information about L.A. Dance Project, please visit their website.
Written by Jeff Slayton for LA Dance Chronicle.
Featured image: Jessie Lee Thorne in Veil of Voices – Photo by Layne P. Willis.
