Double Guest Blog- GravelWorks

Robyn Ross & Adam Sultan both had the opportunity to catch GravelWorks and share their thoughts-

Robyn Ross-

It’s been two days since I saw GravelWorks, and the image that endures is that of a woman jumping, legs first, into the arms of a standing man. Not hoping he’ll catch her, but expecting it. Demanding it.

It would be easy for this moment to be lost amid GravelWorks’ wit and mocking humor, though. Like many Fusebox performers, the company’s art exists in two dimensions: the work itself, and the work about the work. In the same show the company performed both dance and commentaries on dance, offerings its own art and then deconstructing the world in which that art was created.

On the first level—the work itself—GravelWorks specializes in conflicted relationships. And in falling. GW’s dancers raise one another up, then hurl themselves to the floor. The first piece, the “Epic Duet,” features the desperate but trusting leap described above, fall after intentional fall, and embraces both angry and longing. The last long piece in the show returns to these themes, pairing first male-female couples and then same-gender partners in a series of brief duets. They push and pull each other, one dancer’s hands grabbing the other’s throat, then transforming the gesture into a caress.

The second level, the work about the work, is GW’s ironic commentary on contemporary dance. For one composition, the company performs a series of “dramatic poses” – only the endings to imagined dances that preceded them. It’s a joke, an act that by amplifying the seriousness of the poses makes us aware of how dance can take itself too seriously. The dramatic endings, the piece that begins with the entire company just drinking a beer, the “politically engaged dance” that consists of a man jogging furiously in place while eating fries, are all great—funny—challenges to convention. But the show also includes a piece with full nudity that seems contrived, and one where the accompaniment is some of the men singing Nirvana’s “Rape Me.”  In these moments the company’s efforts to poke fun at the pretensions of contemporary dance border on becoming pretentious themselves.

Where is the line between pushing boundaries and simply going for shock? How much facility must one demonstrate with tradition before having the credibility to defy it? In introducing the piece called “The Post-Climactic Moment,” Gravel explains that, “It takes a lot of work to get to the post-climactic moment, but we’ll skip it and just do the moment.” This is the potential risk for GravelWorks—skipping the work it takes to get to the moment, and just making the moment.

When Gravel’s company really dances, it is captivating. A particularly provocative piece in the latter half of the show features a duet between an expressionless woman and a man who lifts her in the air, often by a bent arm hooked in her crotch. When the initial discomfort passed, I had to look closer to find what was really happening. Was he manipulating her? After all, she was demanding to be set down at a specific place on the stage, and he was complying. Maybe the relationship was more complicated than it initially appeared.

I come back to Ron’s description of Fusebox as showcasing work “about what it means to be alive today.” To be alive today is to be part of complicated relationships, ones simultaneously full of intimacy and loneliness. It is to have the choice between following tradition and thumbing our nose at it, or doing some of both. It is to take some things very seriously, and others not at all.

I hope that GravelWorks, as amusing as its parodies of contemporary dance are, continues to make actual contemporary dance. Because I want to see that woman leaping at that man again, and hold my breath to find out what happens next.

Adam Sultan-

Living in Austin–or perhaps my life in Austin–is weird. Not weird in a “Keep Austin Weird” way, but weird in how things bump in the night and how they tend to their bruises or smile at their fortune.

Weird how things fly at each other with serious, or drunken, or serious drunken intent, and then completely miss each other, only to be found face-planted in a corner, deep in dialogue, or if lucky, speechless (and luckier still if not alone).

Weird how the same tired beer in the same ridiculous can you’ve been drinking over and over again suddenly tastes different. Or perhaps you’re just discovering it for the first time: that sour, hoppy, sweet mess as, past your friend’s shoulder, you notice things flying at each other and missing and sometimes not.

Why do they play jukeboxes so loud that we have to rely on subtitles on the TV screen? Why can’t I distinguish nude from naked, and do I even have to?  Why are the boys better musicians and the girls better dancers? Why is this move getting us in trouble…or is this the move that gets us out of it?

Gravelworks, the Montreal rock and roll messengers of tongue-in-cheek pub brawls and maladroit mating calls, didn’t display the answers, but they raised the questions- and the bar- higher. Now how am I supposed to reach for a can? Oh, they left them down here for us, in a cooler by the door. Hope I don’t bump into anyone. But I’m sure I will.