Gallim Dance: The sharp, the hot and the smeary

By Barry Johnson

Gallim Dance's Blush took me by surprise Friday night -- fast-moving, sharp angles and edges, emotionally charged which is to say alternately sad and angry, sweaty and smeary from the chalk on the floor, a general sense of isolation and loss even when the dancers were moving in unison.



Somehow choreographer Andrea Miller's description of the dance at the symposium on American women choreographers last weekend had slipped past me (and so had what she said in this interview). She was so warm, engaging and vulnerable onstage that when she brought up Blush's connection to S&M, it didn't achieve any traction in my brain, nor did her allusion to Blush's key source, Ryu Murakami's Tokyo Decadence, which works the theme of S&M and personal loss to great effect.

Marty Hughley's review in The Oregonian connects the dance to butoh (maybe it's the chalk and the expressiveness), praises Miller's creation of a "distinct world," identifies the varied musical palette (from classical to electro-punk) and the aggressive lighting and spare design (a large white taped square, lighting that sometimes obscures as much as it reveals), and suggests Blush's eroticism without really defining it. He also points out that the dance is "theatrical" without telling a specific story.

I would add that the dance is episodic (like a movie, maybe) with blackouts between scenes. Each scene works some of the same movement ground -- collapsed and rolling shoulders, for example, abdominal crunches, speedy collapses to the floor and a general inclination toward painful positions of various sorts. And the occasional topless appearances of the female dancers isn't at all erotic, implying fragility more than anything. The opening solo, a beautiful soft emergence from the half-light, is a case in point.