A mix-up at Links Hall resulted in a fortuitous dance marathon Dec. 19 at Links Hall, with a mixed bill called Ring Sour (see Khecari review) featuring Khecari and San Francisco-based Blind Tiger Society and late-night showing of Molly Shanahan/Mad Shak’s Tiny Liquid Bones. Begun as an ongoing investigation in 2014, Shanahan capitalized on her long-distance relationship with her company while based in Philadelphia to pursue her PhD. Shanahan collected recordings of four voices: hers, in addition to performers Kristina Fluty, Benjamin Law, and Jessica Marasa. Each of the recordings – like diary entries or answering machine recordings – is about language, revealing the ways in which speach, accents, and dialects have impacted the performers’ experiences.
Under the umbrella name Virtuosity of Forgetting, the first installment of this ongoing series premiered last winter, although Tiny Liquid Bones looks and feels more like a second edition than part of a series. Tiny Liquid Bones, like its predecessor, is personal and idiosyncratic. The dancers walk in and pour water into individual bowls. They stare into the water, gazing at their reflections in the water and into small mirrors at their stations. Each writes messages on his/her mirror with a tube of lipstick, clearing space for a new phrase by smearing the mess all over their faces. After a wash at the water bowls, Tiny Liquid Bones begins in earnest with what appear to be improvised duets set to the recorded text.
In the original installment last year, the text was played out in long stretches, so that audience members might hear the personal details of each account and understand a little about each dancer and his/her relationship with language. Watching them improvise to their text revealed even more as his/her language about language manifested in the body. Tiny Liquid Bones, however, layers the recordings in frustratingly dense collections, creating a wall of sound that forces audience members to chose their battles and try to discern one voice over another, or admit defeat and ignore them entirely. I mostly opted for the latter, letting the sound wash over me, but I also had the luxury of having heard the text before. It occurred to me that a first time viewer might have found the jumble of text frustrating.
The virtue in Tiny Liquid Bones is its ending. The four dancers, seated, face upstage, giving direction to fake subjects before turning to us, looking for our approval with guilty, longing, somewhat ridiculous faces. “I want you to like it,” said Shanahan. “I mean, I know it’s not important you like it, but I want you to like it.”
There is no doubt about the skill of these performers, or the intellect of Shanahan’s process. Blurring the lines between practice, performance, and the internal dialogue of every choreographer (whether she admits it or not), makes for a compelling movement experiment, that isn’t likely meant as a finished product – at least not right now. Tiny Liquid Bones reminded me of a recent conversation about food. Some people eat one thing at a time, keeping all the components of a meal separate. Others mash it all together and eat their meals as one big glop. If Virtuosity of Forgetting was a dinner, Tiny Liquid Bones is the glop: totally delicious, but even better if you already know what each food tastes like on its own.
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