Dance review: Mary Oslund slows it down

By Barry Johnson

When I was working on a story about choreographer Mary Oslund for Portland Monthly back in November, I sat in on a rehearsal of Childhood Star, which premiered Thursday in White Bird's Uncaged series. At that rehearsal, she was experimenting with the idea of slowing the movement phrases she'd created by something like half. Usually, Oslund's work occupies the entire tempo spectrum, from still to explosive, but most of the time I'd characterize it as "brisk." At least. So the rehearsal worked to my advantage -- it was far easier to see what was going on when everything was in slow motion.

"Childhood Star"/Photo by Julie Keefe

Oslund must have liked what she saw back then, because Childhood Star, now in performance, still moves along at a deliberate clip, and seeing it that way again was informative. It made the dance seem "minimal" somehow, reduced to the basics, even though the phrases themselves, if you sped them up, wouldn't have seemed that way at all. So I don't mean less complex. But stretched out in this way, we appreciate those lingering phrases, those slowly unfolding gestures, those pauses which grow into full stops, in a different way, as though we are seeing them for the first time, maybe in the same way we appreciate a cube differently when we've seen Sol LeWitt address the idea.

I don't think it's any easier to dance it this way, though sometimes, when a long line of muscles engaged in order -- thigh to belly to shoulder to arm to wrist to fingers -- it seemed positively luxurious.  I wanted to stretch in this way, too. But then at other times, keeping the momentum of a  phrase going seemed nearly impossible or the dance asked the dancer to extend a leg very slowly, almost too slowly to maintain balance.