If you go to see “Down-A” at the Indy Fringe Festival this week, you will either love it or hate it.
Me? I loved it!
Two virtually naked dancers – a man and a woman – interpret a piece of still art such as a painting or, in this case, a play by William Shakespeare, so as to allow the audience to experience the piece in a primal, electron-level way. The dancers move very slowly for the most part, although there are occasional, and startling, leaps and rolls.
They also move very, very specifically, with almost super-human control and balance. You can see each sinew, each muscle, in their white-painted bodies expanding and contracting with perfect purpose. Nothing is wasted. Nothing is missing. Nothing is hidden.
The emotions they convey come from the whole human range – everything from childlike pleasure to orgasmic pleasure, and everything from basic physical needs to the ultimate yearning for connection to the Divine.
Or at least that is what they conveyed to me.
Ezio Tangini, the man, is from Italy. Flavia Ghisalberti, the woman, is from Switzerland. Their company, the “In Between Butoh Dance Company,” is based in Rome, Italy.
Their flier says that this particular piece is part of a larger project that has been linked ideologically to the “evocative history of the memory of psychiatric hospitals and the healing of the legacy of suffering and embarrassment associated with them.”
Anyone who has ever been called crazy for wanting to be an artist owes it to himself or herself to give this show a chance.
There is one performance of “Down-a” left during the Indy Fringe Festival: Friday, August 31 at 6:00 pm in the Auditorium at the Athenaeum (Go to the American Cabaret Theatre and walk down the hall past the box office).
Hope Baugh, writer