In the dance-filled month of January, Pioneers Go East Collective’s Out-FRONT Festival makes Judson Memorial Church its home for new performance. Owen Prum and Jo Warren’s split bill, one of many programs in the festival’s 4th year, lets fragments of pop culture, dance and its industry, and Americana create fuzzy impressions of today’s milieu within their individual worlds.
Extremely Chemical teeters between a driving, propulsive inner world and an orderly, restrained outer world. We find Prum skittish in its opening, swathed in red light, twitching about the space as the other dancers remain motionless–frozen–on the altar. Prum juts his foot in four directions, trapping himself in a box as his hands skirt to his rib, grabbing as if something is trying to crawl its way out. Prum’s movements accumulate in intensity, and the droning synth begins to drown the church, until he’s on the ground. He crawls low, with a nervousness like he’s caught between deciding between fight or flight, and then jumps up and grabs for his rib again.
He jerks around, into the walkways between the folding chairs and back to the center, while the other dancers remain above and away. It begins to feel like Prum will never stop, or can’t stop, until the lights come up and the sound ceases. We’re pulled from the battle Prum seems to be facing alone, from the inner chaos to the outer collective.
There’s a distinct changing of worlds as two people replace Prum in the central floor. They pick up fragments from a slew of dance lexicons as they twist and trace an invisible grid on the floor. Two people, remaining on the altar, alternate between watching the patterns and having a goofy silent rock concert on their own. They grab onto bits of Graham, with a broad, reaching extension, before pulling in the little head-bob from the “Thriller” music video. It’s a puzzle to trace, made a bit witty with the detached precision the dancers maintain, but there’s a gaping vacuum of intensity following Prum’s opening.
Jo Warren’s operatic All Mouth evokes images of American suburbia, echoing Prum’s collaging of dance canon. It builds characters and relationships in a slippery way, cutting underneath itself from scene to scene to betray what’s expected. A dancer in daisy dukes and a cherry-red scrunchie lets herself go boneless in a duet, surrendering their weight to the other with the hope that they’ll be caught. In a different duet with another partner, the daisy duke-clad dancer wrenches themself out of a kiss to tauntingly trace the space on tip-toe.
The narrative is sometimes hard to discern in the drama, but Warren constructs images that jut out of the piece with clarity. When the dancers come together at the altar, faces shining toward the audience, the tableau feels biblical. They morph, slowly, in and out of sculpture-like shapes of passion, intimacy, or a battle. Then, like a switch is flipped, the ensemble begins yelling at the audience, pointing their fingers like we’re the other half of a family argument going down in the kitchen. A crack in the artifice, Warren leads us to mistrust the reality we’ve grown to associate with normality.
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