The Fate of Choice
Motion X Dance, in collaboration with Copper Note design
Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival
Washington, D.C.
February 22, 2020
In this multi-media dance work choreographer Stephanie Dorrycott and graphic designer Lindsay Benson Garrett, also known as Copper Note Design, address a duality that’s been around as long as people have: choice vs. fate. My interest was piqued by that premise alone. Could contemporary dance/art reveal something new or different about an ages-old question that philosophers have long wrestled with?
The Fate of Choice, a second collaboration for D.C.’s Dorrycott and Benson Garrett of Virginia, premiered this past Saturday at the Atlas INTERSECTIONS Festival. These two creators first teamed up on “Altered Archives” for the Capital Fringe Festival in 2015. This new work was their first opportunity to work together again.
The first section of the hour-long piece focused on choice. Seven female dancers took the stage in a line while a projected image, a curtain of countless strands, provided a backdrop. The line of dancers then staggered and dissolved into smaller groups frequently entering and exiting. Similarly costumed in fitted, neutral-toned pants with sheer white tops, the dancers shared a related movement vocabulary, too – limbs fully extended, hiccups of balletic jumps with arched feet, smooth descents into the floor and backward rolls.
With no identifiable patterns in the group formations, “choice” had a random feeling echoed in the projections. After the strands, came projected folds in the shape of ribbon candy. Generally speaking, no matter what shapes filled the screen, there were many of them. On her website, Garrett refers to these projections as “abstract video illustrations.” An exception was her video of a single long, waving piece of orange fabric.
“Fate” was the focus of the second section. In one movement of seven in total, the fabric limited a dancer’s movement choices. She could go under the fabric, go around it, or get bound by it, not to mention, the liberating option of tossing it away. The fabric, as used by the performers, created apt metaphors for fate. Rather than getting trapped – bound up -- by fate, it’s possible to circumvent or even escape.
At the talkback following the performance, a dancer remarked about the fabric: “The choreography is set, but the fabric has a mind of its own.” That observation served as a great reminder for human experience -- try as we might to make certain choices in hopes of a particular outcome, things don’t always go as we’d like. Sometimes forces are beyond anyone’s control. Perhaps, that’s where the work’s title, “The Fate of Choice,” comes in.
Those who missed Motion X’s premiere of “The Fate of Choice” will have a second chance to see it. The encore presentation will be given April 18-19, 2020, at Joy of Motion Dance Center’s Jack Guidone Theater.
Photos by Ruth Judson, courtesy Motion X Dance