FALLING INTO HERE or THE IMPORTANCE OF NORMAL (The Naked Stark/ First Person Arts): Dance review

Excerpted from thINKingDANCE.net.

Photo: Kathryn Raines
Photo: Kathryn Raines

Fractured. Awry. Akilter. There is frighteningly little cohesion and order (or shall we call it normalcy?) in the dark visual and kinesthetic world that Katherine Kiefer Stark presents in Falling into Here or The Importance of Normal. The performance is a welcome dance work among the talking heads presentations of the 12th annual First Person Arts Festival, a 10-day affair dedicated mostly to autobiographical narrative expressed through storytelling and song.

In the shifting, dissolving realities of the piece, Stark, as choreographer and director, and through her small group of dancers and musicians, The Naked Stark, leaves it ambiguous as to whether the narrative is a first person account from a family member who suffered from mental illness, or a tale from those who knew her. The audience first views a jumbled set of plywood constructions angled askew, strewn with overturned chairs. Megan Wilson Stern and others arrange themselves within the chairs, then fall asunder, unexpectedly; none sit erect as upright chairs intend. Others lie on the floor amidst the set’s debris, as Eleanor Goudie-Averill obsessively marks and then frolics along a chalk square perimeter she lays down around all…. Read the full review at thINKingDANCE.net.
November 8-9, 2013,  firstpersonarts.orgthenakedstark.com.

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