Sidra Bell, an award-winning New York-based choreographer, debuted her full-length work, “Introspection: An Evening of Works from the Canon,” Oct. 17 at the Pittsburgh Playhouse.
As a dancer with previous experience embodying Bell’s movement style, in addition to viewing her staged work “Two Eyes” for Point Park’s annual Fall Dance Concert, I walked into this performance with an acute background knowledge of her choreography.
But what I had yet to learn, though, was this was a 20-year-long accumulation of Bell’s multidimensional modes of self expression.This brought a fresh perspective to the Playhouse audience with recurring themes of invoking a sense of play, humanness and looming energy in her work.
Witnessing these concepts manifested in the movement of these dancers through the internationally-acclaimed choreographers’ lens left my soul floating in mid-air trying desperately to find its way back to earth as I exited the theater doors.
One Point Park alumna who performed in Bell’s piece, Kimmie Parker, class of 2019, explained the timeline and creation of the show.
“This exact evening-length work was originally put together three years ago,” Parker said “We did this first in Cincinnati, but all the works are works of hers that she’s made throughout twenty years of being a choreographer.”
Throughout the entire work, I couldn’t help but notice an emotional hyper-awareness to the balletic lines in which the dancers executed onstage.
Such mindfulness and exploration was usually found when painted over a simple grande plie, where the body descends by way of the knees bending whilst rotating out simultaneously.
Maintaining the integrity of the position, these dancers take on explorational-gestural movement, allowing their palms, wrists and arms to move independently from their stagnantly-positioned lower body.
This alone invoked a polarization from the strict-balletic universe, a territory in which Bell holds sufficient knowledge in. As the first Black woman to have staged a work for the New York City Ballet Company, she uses balletic foundations in the building blocks.
However, Bell relieves the dancers of any of ballet’s lingering rigidity, allowing them to have an experience or reveal their subconscious actions in the work.
Prime examples are found within the third piece in the program, “Your Distance Kept,” which showcases the dancers draped in balletic undergarments like practice tutus and plain leotards.
Additionally, other dancers are dressed in dilapidated clown or mime attire, giving an eerie and twisted depiction of dated modes of entertainment. There seemed to be some form of mockery in the work, specifically aimed at entertainers or muses made to serve the public through their mannerisms of exaggerated charisma or unbroken poise.
Christian Warner, an alumnus who graduated in 2016 and performed in the show, elaborated on the essence of this particular piece.
“There are moments of the section we call ‘Your Distance Kept,’ in which [Bell] was talking about elements of puppetry,” Warner said. “There’s often themes of looming that’ll come up, often things of revealing or of disruption that’ll come up.”
Indeed, Bell revealed and disrupted.
With twisted, looming movement dynamics found in the upper body, meshed with the expansive-lines of a balletic lower body — all complemented by a harsh, experimental soundscape — this piece signified Bell’s sense of play.
And Bell utilizes these senses through the use of theatrical archetypes, like a clown or a ballerina, to reveal something more ominous and almost horrifying.
The ideas of “looming” and “reveal” were recurring motifs that Bell sprinkled into works later on in the program.
An unmistakable occurrence of this was “Grief Point,” where the 2018 graduate, A.J. Libert, walks onto stage holding an umbrella with a stern look on his face, his eyes through the edge of the stage with the illuminating vibrancy of a single spotlight.
One would assume from the initial silhouette that Libert would begin his solo shortly after, but he, under the direction of Bell, tricks us and briefly exits to place his umbrella backstage.
This artistic choice is meant to leave us as audience members unsatisfied by the false bout of anticipation that quickly washed over our skin. In actuality, this disruptive choice lifted my back out of my seat, causing me to dwell on the idea that performers rarely have the choice when placed on stage to just flee immediately into the wings.
We’re so used to seeing a dancer walk onto stage and stand there in preparation. Bell, being the playful-multidimensional artist she is, plays a little trick on the audience and has Libert walk off stage, leaving us with the picture of the man in the umbrella in mind for only a fleeting moment. He then walks back out a second time, umbrella out of hand and off to the side, ready to start moving.
Something about these fleeting moments of abnormality brought a sense of whimsy and untrammable curiosity to the artistic essence of Bell.
“The thing that makes Sidra Bell, Sidra Bell, is the way that she thinks about dance,” Libertt said. “And then her ability to kind of use these imaginary practices to invoke these feelings or these elements that live within the work is really special, and the way she cultivates that is really interesting and specific to her.”
It’s artists like Bell who are so important to the progression of the dance industry. Bell not only challenges what is digestible to the audience’s eye, but expands the level of understanding to reach that of the dancers’ own experiences.
By encouraging her dancers, exploring the recollection of memory and questioning the definition of art, Bell creates space for aspiring-professional artists to push boundaries and go rogue as well.
