Daniel Mont-Eton: Homeward

When I think of Dan Mont-Eton’s “Homeward” I think ambient – a word derived from ambire in Latin, meaning “to go around” - and around and around. I think of the dancers’ almost constant physical contact when dancing together, each an integral part of the other’s environment, supported by textural music composed by Michael Wall. If the dancers weren’t in physical contact, they were in unison, or at least close proximity. This relationship made it seem as if the three were one entity, all clad in cream-colored clothes.

I think of how jarring it was when Amy Falls first left the stage, breaking performative contact with Mont-Eton and Samantha Matsukawa, but watching them, waiting to be swept back into movement that never ceased for the forty-minute long performance. This sense of isolation or incompleteness when one dancer was gone was a reaction stemming from their connectivity when together; there was a phrase in which they all lay down on their sides “spooning” one another and linking their top arms to become one arm moving in a snake-like way. This phrase was repeated on the floor, and then standing; each repetition was changed by location and what came before or after it. When they did the “spoon-snake” close to the audience, they broke their connected arms by rolling to their backs and began weaving their opposite hands through their arms. I could have experienced this mesmerizing arm weave for a longer duration, but it ended as soon as it began to develop a visual pattern, like a braid left unfinished, the image quickly unraveled.

This unraveling fits the idea that homeward is not quite home - the piece did not settle, it was constantly moving to the next possibility either by relocating to a new physical location, or falling into new choreography. Falling was a constant - much of the movement was initiated by a sustained fall into a run, or collapse to the ground, or into another dancer. Toward the end of the piece, after Mont-Eton had danced separate duets with Matsukawa and Falls, he was left alone. He swept one leg into an arabesque in an upstage corner, then fell into a run on the diagonal to the opposite corner repeatedly until Matsukawa joined, then Falls. The three repeated this alternately sustained and sweeping phrase, providing a visual palate-cleanser after so much axial movement with one another.

For most of the piece, the performers expressions were stern, brows slightly furrowed, as if they really were searching for something elusive to provide a sense of comfort typically found at home. They repeatedly made a triangular shape with their legs and let one arm shift back and forth between their legs like a grandfather clock, evoking a sense of waiting, their arms like a compass hand that they would use to decide where to go next.

Sometimes the next place was an angular house-like shape with their bodies; they would shift out of this - or any shape - very quickly by running away or slapping one hand to the opposite forearm while turning or slapping one foot on the ground. At one point all three ran to the wall of the Studio Theater black-box and slapped their hands against it, leaning into it as if they were trying to push it away. Mont-Eton and Matsukawa’s duet was similar as they would move fluidly with together, but quickly become rigid towards each other, arms connected but firmly pushing away before the cycle continued. All of this pushing  in conjunction with the lighting design casting a shadow of window blinds on the ground made them seem trapped inside. It makes sense that one would not be comfortable being a house just as much as they wouldn’t be comfortable trapped inside one.

“Homeward” ended in the same corner that it began, but instead of standing in isolation, all three dancers were lying down next to one another, facing away from the audience. Falls traced a design onto Matsukawa’s back, who then traced another (secret message?) onto Mont-Eton’s back, who received the message as the lights went dark. The ambience of this piece was brooding, leaving me to wonder what a dance called “Home” would be like.

Left to right: Matsukawa, Mont-Eton, and Falls in "Homeward". Photo by Dat Nyguyen/Motion Vivid, lighting by James K. Larsen. 

Follow this link for more photos of "Homeward" by Dat Nyguyen/Motion Vivid.

Emma Wilson received her BFA in Modern Dance at the University of Utah and has since been making solo works, choreographing for Deseret Experimental Opera (DEXO), and working as the Salt Lake City Library’s Community Garden Coordinator.

Dollhouse

Gretchen Huff and Marissa Mooney both hold dual degrees in modern dance and gender studies from the University of Utah. Together they produced Dollhouse this past weekend, exploring themes of womanhood and femininity in and amongst the rooms of a historic home in the Avenues. Huff and Mooney, also the show’s main performers, led audiences on a planned, and eventually repeating, circuit through all levels of the house and four sections: “Maiden,” “Mother,” “Wild Woman,” and “Crone.”

Many of the rooms featured striking installations created by Kate Gourley-Thomas: a closet full of shelves lined with paper-dolls depicting many-bodied women and flora; a heap of aromatic potting soil in the living room over which hung a nest of branches encasing a chandelier; and a mass of gauzy webs crisscrossing a cellar room. Mooney co-created the cellar installation, in addition to creating one for the kitchen: spoons taped to every surface - cupboards, walls, drawers - each one cupping a fried egg.

In the opening “Maiden,” Huff and Mooney were clad in white bras and briefs, sitting at the foot of a bed. With strategically placed slices of frosted cake, they explicitly used their fingers to deliver icing from cake/nether region to mouth, staring the audience down sullenly. It was confrontational and occasionally uncomfortable, though maybe no more so than in another intimate setting where performers stare unrelentingly back at audience members.

They moved into an adjacent bathroom, where they did a duet in an enclosed shower that I saw flashes of through reflection in a mirror, beside a tub filled with lollipops and other candy and detritus. Sounds of their bodies knocking together and a building film of steam on the shower door indicated a strong physicality, as the two continued their exploration of the corporeal discovery of maidenhood.

Downstairs for “Mother,” Huff and Mooney donned aprons with Jessica Pace, who had been frantically frying eggs, and the three cheerily, but sarcastically, danced to Sam Cooke’s “Sugar Dumpling.” The dance commented upon outward appearances, specifically those of suburban housewives, belying troubled inner landscapes (reinforced by a conspicuous pile of prescription pill bottles on the counter). The pill-popping housewife may be a real, and worrisome, affliction, but I felt the depiction here oversimplified the invariably nuanced roles that a contemporary woman might actually find herself taking on throughout motherhood.

In the adjacent dining room, three women passed around a casserole dish of anecdotes on mother- , wife-, and daughterhood, from which they took turns reading selections aloud. These potentially autobiographical snippets offered compelling challenges found within these relationships. I wanted to linger more here (and did return after completing the full cycle), but we were ushered onward into the peat-scented, dirt-laden living room for “Wild Woman,” where Natalie Border and Meagan Bertelsen, in Pina Bausch-like white slips, awaited.

After circling around and rolling in the dirt with these two wild women, no longer constrained by kitchen appliances and the compulsion to clean, Huff and Mooney made the journey with the audience down to the cellar for “Crone.” Here, Samantha Matsukawa passed the time knitting in her rocking chair amongst the gauzy web installation. She joined in with Huff and Mooney for some gentle postures and gestures. “Crone” was quiet and contemplative, and in this way opened itself up more for introspection and interpretation than some of the previous and more visually graphic or overt sections.

“Crone” ended outside in the backyard, the performers watering handmade, silvery flowers that poked up out of the yard and out of the deck, before returning quickly into the house to begin “Maiden” again in the upstairs bedroom. I thought this last image of flower-watering, outside in the dark and cold, was lovely and wished the performers had explored this section for longer.

Upon re-entering the house through the “Mother” scene in the kitchen, I was reminded of Dollhouse’s focus on some feminine roles through an antiquated lens. Maybe it’s my own bias, due in part to the potentially privileged lack of constraint I feel regarding my own role in society, but the “woman in the kitchen” trope feels less to me like a concern of 2017 and more one of, for example, 1972 - the year Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, with other feminist artists from Cal Arts, opened Womanhouse in Los Angeles.  

Upon a post-Dollhouse refresher, I realized the performance I had just seen drew heavily, and even directly, from Womanhouse in several instances. Presumably, this was an intentional effort by Huff and Mooney to position their work within the feminist art historical tradition, but it was not attributed as such.

"How would you like your eggs done / this morning?," Robin Weltsch wrote, about The Kitchen for the catalog that accompanied Womanhouse. The Kitchen walls were covered in circular nodes that were at once eggs and nipples.

Faith Wilding created a pronouncedly non-functional shelter with her Crocheted Environment for Womanhouse, which featured web-like strands knit together to form a spidery cave, dimly lit by a single bulb.

Wilding performed “Waiting,” a contemplation on passivity in which she rocked back and forth in a chair reviewing her life from beginning to end.

The observation of such close similarities led me to believe Dollhouse wasn’t exploring its creators’ ideas and concerns, but rather recapitulating those voiced by women and artists decades earlier. Problematically, it was unclear to me both the extent to which this was intentional and, therefore, the desired effect. 

Regardless of clear context or positioning of intent, a viable takeaway from Dollhouse is that gender roles may be more complicated now than in the 1970s. Struggles voiced by mid-twentieth century feminists may remain struggles for contemporary feminists, though might crop up in new ways. Yet, strangely, more subversive elements from Womanhouse were absent from Huff and Mooney’s performance.

Judy Chicago’s Menstruation Bathroom demonstrated "an image of women’s hidden secret, covered over with a veil of gauze...and deodorized...except for the blood." Chicago observed, "However we feel about our own menstruation is how we feel about seeing its image in front of us."

Written by Chicago and Wilding, the performance of Cock and Cunt Play featured "two women, each wearing a plastic “part” designating their respective sex. The women “play” man and woman, engaged in the age-old battle about domestic and sexual duties and demands.  “She wants ”him” to help her with the dishes and provide her with sexual gratification. “he” is outraged by these demands and takes his rage out on her by killing her with his plastic phallus."

Even the eponymous dollhouse in the entryway lacked the subversion of Schapiro’s 1972 counterpart. Here, it could have been any girl’s plaything. Schapiro’s featured a rattlesnake, grizzly bear, peering men, and other threats and reversals lurking within its diminutive rooms.

Dollhouse’s self-awareness remains untenable based on provided information, and even assuming Womanhouse as the springboard, so do Huff and Mooney’s decisions to incorporate some themes while excluding others.

True to Womanhouse, though, Dollhouse “echoes the feelings of a Woman’s place”, as Schapiro first described in 1972. Perhaps those same feelings are just as resonant today, but the ways in which we voice them have shifted, as seen by Huff and Mooney's inclusion, exclusion, and divergence from Womanhouse ideas. After all, how we grapple with the present is unavoidably shaped by our acknowledgement of and engagement with the past.

Source: The Womanhouse Online Archive (http://www.womanhouse.net/)

Amy Falls is loveDANCEmore’s program coordinator and a regular contributor to the blog. She works for the University of Utah's School of Dance, her alma mater.