In SALT, a semi-interactive dance-theater work by Los Angeles-based Volta Collective, director-choreographer Mamie Green and writers Sammy Loren and Ellington Wells take on Euripides’s Medea. But, instead of featuring a vengeful enchantress and her Argonaut husband, SALT depicts two cynical artists exploiting each other to fulfill both emotional and financial desires.
Jason (George Olesky) is an older, more established artist, who one day encounters Medea (Ellington Wells) in front of a painting at an exhibition of his work. Medea thinks it’s awful, and Jason is aroused. The two enter a tumultuous relationship that is draining but mutually beneficial. He encourages her to network and shmooze, two skills more important than talent (though Medea is talented, Jason admits), and she collaborates with him, making his work more relevant leading to a renaissance of his career. They narrate their meet-cute and ensuing romance while engaged in a physical duet, clutching each other’s forearms in deep lunge positions, facing off in a tug-of-war. The characters fight for control of the pose. Whoever seizes the other more forcefully can reorient the choreography and turn towards the audience to deliver their lines.
Then Medea and Jason split, each herding half the audience into their respective corners. I was ushered towards Medea to learn her side of the story, but in the small room at the Brooklyn Center for Theatre Research, I could overhear segments of Jason’s monologue. The resulting effect was a cacophony of gossip: “You should’ve been an actress,” “He said, she lies,” “Do you see what happens when he tells my story?” “I was the one doing the birthing,” “Have you ever wanted something so bad it drove you mad?” “I encouraged her to take her art more seriously,” “Deep down I embarrassed him.”
Dancing both with and around Medea and Jason were three dancers, Mamie Green, Mateo Vidals, and Michaela Esteban. Sometimes they are partners, lifting the main characters and hauling them around the loft, physically extricating them from conflict. At other moments, they perform with each other in sequences of pure movement to a live score by Melissa Achten and Eli Klausner. The eerie, vibrating soundscape complemented the dancers’ dynamic movement. In a particularly intriguing phrase, the trio covered their faces with a relaxed palm, almost paw-like, and rolled their torsos while hauling their bodies forward in a wide, open-legged shape. Their dancing was punctuated by moments when they used the weight of each other’s bodies to create force and explode in unexpected directions. Green’s choreography, in collaboration with the dancers, gave heft to Medea and Jason’s petty, narcissistic antagonism. The dramatic, vigorous movement contributed seriousness to these emotionally frivolous characters.
In works of dance-theater, there is often a moment when the relationship between the text and movement becomes clear, and the viewer feels they have the key to understanding the performance’s cohesion. For me, that moment came towards the end of SALT, when Medea recounts her act of vengeance—here, not the murder of her children and Jason’s other woman, but the destruction of his paintings. “My shrink asked me why I did it,” she said. “I can’t see myself clearly anymore.” With this line, I started to see the work not as a dyadic view of Medea and Jason’s experiences, but as a kaleidoscopic portrait of Medea’s psyche: a mishmash of repressed thoughts, dissociations, cathexis, projections and introjections. The dancers were not embodied reenactments of the plot, but representations of the fractured state of a woman confused and in despair. In the final scenes, Jason recedes as a character of importance, and Medea comes to the fore. She launches into a reflective monologue that overtakes Jason’s rebuttals. The audience reunites to watch the conclusion of the play, with Medea at the center.
As a director and choreographer, Green deftly navigates the space between theater and dance. And yet at moments, the relationship between language and movement in SALT feels out of sync given the tone in which the story is delivered. Our Medea and Jason are irony-pilled, upspeaking millennials who convey every line with the same nihilistic timbre. They sound like the voice of an internet meme, pithy but mocking, full of one-liners but no real substance. The sarcasm of the script and actors’ performances belies the quality of SALT as a work of dance-theater, capable of far greater expression. I left wanting Green and her collaborators to apply their talents to a project with more sincerity. Volta’s compelling breed of dance-theater seems better suited to a straight subject, building meaning and narrative without the burden of satire.
Despite discord between the moods of text and choreography, SALT is a rich and energizing work. In a moment when minimalist, abstract post-modern dance is making a comeback among young choreographers in New York City, Green’s athletic lexicon of movement and embrace of narrative is refreshing. Updating a story like Medea to comment on the state of the culture industry is also clever, and places Volta in the tradition of avant-gardists who have reimagined classical myths to address their present. We will be lucky if Volta returns soon, to share its exciting vision of dance-theater, perhaps with a bit more earnestness.
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