By J. Beardsley
December 7, 2021
weighted sky, a new collaborative performance piece between artists of slowdanger (anna thompson and taylor knight), MICHIYAYA Dance (Anya Clarke-Verdery and Mitsuko Clarke-Verdery), and Abdu Ali, premiered at the Andy Warhol Museum November 11, 2021. This performance installation piece “explores the collapse of capitalism and white supremacist structures on the bodies of people, nationally and globally.” The work includes original set design by Rob Hackett, an integral element in this multidimensional piece. It is a powerful blend of dance, design, theater, and poetry that transports the viewers to both apocalyptic and utopic environments, demanding that we more closely examine the developing era and our collective response to it.
weighted sky, running about an hour in length, takes its time to develop. The piece begins with a striking image of performers arranged inside of a structure that includes a ladder, a stool, flat boards strung together with metal hoops, a clear basket reminiscent of a backpack, and debris littered around the space. The raw material and understated costuming creates an environment that feels post-, in all senses of the prefix. I get the feeling that the people on the stage have endured something; we are witnessing what happens after. An abrasive and raw soundtrack of electronic beats and sounds accompanies the evening’s performance, layering intensity and gravity into the space. As the piece develops, each dancer begins to deconstruct this initial image, taking on a set piece as their designated prop. What follows is a series of vignettes enacted as solos. Each artist dances with and is danced by their set piece, exchanging burden, glances, frustration, forgiveness, weightlessness, and empathy with their objects. The images the dancers each create with their objects are directed, intimate, and striking. Mitsuko obsessively writes, erases, and rewrites unseen text across a pane of clear, flexible material reminiscent of a whiteboard. The audience, not privy to the information that Mitsuko is furiously processing, is left to ponder at the urgency and madness behind the gestures. Anya performs alongside a clear sack modeling a backpack. They deposit scraps of other set pieces into it, engaging a meditative act of gathering, consolidating, and collecting. They dance a solo that inhabits precise articulations reminiscent of popping and locking and moments of weightless abandon that are free and vulnerable. One striking image is Anya, simply spinning slowly around themselves, head and eyes upstretched and mouth parted towards the sky. Us as viewers inhabit this dreamy moment with them, a beautiful wandering that stands apart from the previous feeling-states we witnessed. anna performs totally draped underneath a blanket of wooden boards, attached to each other via metal rings. They wrap themselves in it, finding comfort perhaps in the shielding this overwhelming structure provides. As their solo progresses, their actions become wilder and more frantic, slowly succumbing to the gravity of their duet partner. taylor is the final soloist, partnering with a tall wooden structure shaped like an oblong pyramid. They push this giant structure around, taking on an aggressive nature that suggests a battle between themselves and this object.
These solos exist as a snapshot of the times. The qualities of each performer are clear and individual, and coalesce into a greater whole expressing the range of emotions, both felt and repressed, we are collectively enduring as a result of recent years; we witness tension coming to a head. While no experience is universal, these solos effectively capture a huge scope of conversations around what it means, and more importantly what it feels like to exist in the 21st century. We are frustrated, vulnerable, angry, weighted, hopeless, tender, frenetic, unsure, and tired, and the performers are right along with us.
From this point, the piece diverges into a looser structure. The artists begin to interact with each other, though remain energetically distal. Anya and taylor together inhabit a pause of intimacy and quiet, each sliding one by one down Taylor’s set piece like a slide, landing intertwined at the bottom. This tender moment is interrupted by Mitsuko and Anna crawling frantically into the space, shouting things like “let us know how we can help!” and “we are doing the work!” We are immediately thrown into memories of the summer of 2020, when various organizations and arts funders attempted to grapple with the twin pandemics of COVID-19 and systemic racism, often failing in sincerity and instead performing care and concern through carefully scripted statements. The environment begins to further devolve as the endless weight of subjugation, grief, and loss while existing under a capitalist hustle culture layer onto the performers minds and bodies.
Abdu Ali’s powerful, full voice breaks the curse, allowing the performers a moment of rest. Ali recites a poem that is powerful and atoning; “this is the work” they declare, naming deconstruction and radical feeling as a key tool in liberation. They paint wondrous images of “dandelion seeds with a limp wrist, doing some dummy shit,” calling on queerness and play as paths to reclaiming joy. They wonder at possibilities and realities and how the two can converge to a better state. They call on us all to dare to desire better, to take things for ourselves, and to experience joy fearlessly and boldly. As their poem comes to a conclusion, the dancers coalesce into a unison group phrase, marking a physical manifesto in the space. The performance ends with a complete abandon of form as the dancers ecstatically throw themselves into movement and the audience is called to join in this resistance/freedom dance.
After witnessing ‘weighted sky,’ I am really feeling the change the last two years have forced upon myself, my communities, and the greater world. I am grieving losses, celebrating relationships, and, most importantly, craving to dream again. While weighted sky does not hold back on its criticism of the structures, systems, and evolving histories we are all subjugated to, its unabashedly honest evaluation feels in itself hopeful. If we can acknowledge the ways that we are all simply not ok, that “doing the work” means more than putting out an Instagram accessibility and equality statement, and that the future is not guaranteed, we can finally begin to enact meaningful change towards the future(s) of our dreams. These artists, whose individual bodies of work have already been “doing the work”, together deliver an unguarded, deeply felt call out and call in, activating awareness and calling on us to react with honesty, anger, dreaminess, grace, and urgency for change.
