Deborah Slater - Ann Murphy

Chairs and things

Hotel of Memories, (more) Furniture Dances
Counterpulse,
San Francisco
May 19, 2006

by Ann Murphy
copyright ©2006, Ann Murphy

Nobody handles a chair like Deborah Slater. Not even David Gordon has always endowed the four legged beast with Slater’s witty existentialism — and Gordon has been known to do a thing or two with a chair.

In her most recent run “Hotel of Memories (more) Furniture Dances” at Counterpulse on Mission Street in San Francisco, Slater continued her explorations beyond the folding chair demi-monde and into a veritable warehouse of furniture — a slanting table, an inflatable mattress, a shifty couch, an aluminum chair and a trapeze. She then ingeniously paired her dancers’ encounter with this sometimes obtuse and often obdurate object world with fragmented variations of “furniture” music by Eric Satie and Dadaist text that at times suggested the writing of Gertrude Stein with Alzheimer’s.

While Satie is widely known for his wistful “Trois Gymnopedies,” and in the dance world for the music for “Parade,” the composer was at core an iconoclast who engaged in Duchampian bits of verbal and aural wit long before the Dadaists came on the scene. His less known pieces have names like “Chilled Pieces,” “Drivelling Preludes (for a Dog)” and “Dried up Embryos,” and rather than a composer, he considered himself a scientist of sound who would weigh different notes with a machine he invented called a phonometer (at the Satie Museum in Honfleur, France). Slater, who herself is drawn to the offbeat, finds common ground with Satie’s sensibilty. By employing Satie’s “furniture music” — compositions he intended to act as background sound--and a quasi-sensical text written by Deborah Crooks, she attempts to meet Satie’s terms by using movement in fragmentary, repeated and secondary ways while zany drama stands out front. The resulting spectacle has a merry-go-round appeal that creates a fluid and often wacky-real world.

As the audience entered the tiny performance space, designed as a room with hanging window frames and swathes of curtains, it was met by two French maids with dusters — the incomparably funny Patrica Jiron and the stunning new-opera singer/performer Dina Emerson. The two hired help who doubled as the production’s stream-of-consciousness, dusted off the guests as the audience members took their seats--sometimes after — and for many minutes intoned in thick French accents such lines as: ”Wait until your name is called and take a seat. When you are seated we will call you,” adding small improvisatory touches along the way. These two performers, along with the sterling musicians Erling Wold, dressed as a bell hop who frequently tumbled over the glut of suitcases in his arms, and Jonathan Segel in tux, provided the vital framework for the evening, giving charming ballast to sometimes untethered dance.

Slater has long combined theater and movement, adding talk to equipment pieces, stitching in dance to what sometimes has largely been a weave of theatrical narrative. The mixing is frequently compelling but just as frequently incomplete, as though she were trying to blend oil and water. Where the various genres of the night fit together most ingeniously was in the Act II material of Jiron and Emerson who worked their way up to a brilliant folie-a-deux about cleaning, giving operatic grandeur to a fetish with dirt and dust. “Dust, mop, clean, polish,” they intoned in emphatic 4/4 time, embellishing the basic line with syncopated onomatopoetics and thrusting body movements. This hilarious riff on the frequently female compulsion to wrangle with and tame the invisible sandstorm of daily existence was one of the funniest vignettes of the season. It culminated with a beautiful Felliniesque portion in which Emerson produced harmonic tones on an array of water-filled crystal goblets.

But the problem of oil and water troubled “Hotel of Memories,” especially during the dance segments. It had largely to do with a movement vocabulary nowhere near as precise or offbeat as either the verbal language or the musical compositions. Although each of the performers danced with signature appeal, and Jennifer Kesler brought virtuosic skill to her acrobatic tussle with a table, the movement tended to derive from either the pragmatics of equipment dance or the pool of drops, turns, lunges and partnering-as-merging that has come to characterize much of Bay Area modern dance. The dancing consequently had little of the crisp absurdity of the text, the swirling set or the lyric, sometimes phantasmagoric sound. Besides literal furniture dances, the dances were meant as metaphoric furniture — background elements we take for granted but depend on both for comfort and a civilized life. Not only were the dances not sufficiently relegated to the background to prove Satie’s point, but they also tended to underscore the fact that not all furniture is the same. While Slater does have an incomparable way with a chair, she would have had a more coherent Surrealist whole had she aimed to incorporate in the actual movement the offbeat but well-structured elegance of an early French sling chair rather than the slouchy comfort of something from IKEA.

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Chairs and things