First we hear sound. A man in a striped suit plays a wind machine as a woman in a blue nightie/evening gown twirls a ribbon. The scene is part Narnia, part North Pole, part Peter Pan.
Snow on the ground.
The whistling wind machine stops but the sound continues.
Shaker transports the viewer to an uncannily familiar yet simultaneously strange world where limbs move in sleepy, fluid motion and then crumple to the ground, as if asleep.
Gender – women and their hair. Women spun by their hair. Women with their hair covered up.
While watching I had visions of dead bodies in the desert sand, unconscious stirrings and outbursts, and a sleepy return to life with eyes closed.
At the end the dancers were in body suits of different colors, sleeping in a row. One would get up and repeat quotidian but very gendered gestures. Despite being de-sexed by their covering costumes the women sewed, the men rode machines and checked their watches.
Where does life begin and dreaming end?
Are we waking or sleeping?
The piece was visually stunning. The entire performance took place in the snow – little Styrofoam pellets that looked like sand (time) or snow. Snow flew out as they walked, made a sshhhing sound with every motion, followed the dancers in arcs as movement’s residue. It left a visible trace of the space they created with their bodies, and at other times threatened to cover them up, erase them. I worried that it would get caught in their noses, throats, underwear – that they would slip – but they didn’t.
They moved according to collisions, gentle and more intense, and according to lines, planes, and momentum, swinging in arcs, bouncing off one and other, and falling quickly after hanging suspended at the top or bottom of a circle.