"Ectospasms" and the Adventure of Consciousness

How strange to see the mechanics and motion of modern dance applied to a specific time and space. I've seen these same girls dance through some nebulous notion of the 1950s, through caverns of Greek myth and through a proper ladies' tea some time after the rise of T.S. Eliot. But tie their sweeps and twirls to real-life events in Hydesville, New York in the 19^th century, and only then does anachronism cross the mind. But if a spirit is a past life intruding on the present time, then it's only right to depict the lives of the past in the present spirit.

Making its debut performance at the 2009 New York International Fringe Festival, "Ectospasms", a forty-five minute dance piece from the Lola Lola Dance Theatre (formerly the Odonata Dance Project), concerns the case of the Fox sisters, which went hand in hand with the rise of the American Spiritualism movement. This review will not relate the history of what ultimately serves only as a jumping-off point. Dance explains itself.

Directed by Edmund B. Lingan and Jessica Bonenfant, featuring the confident choreography of company founder Bonenfant, "Ectospasms" considers spirit and motion together. As if taking its cue from old sepia photographs, the design is kept to browns and grays and unvibrant purples, and a feeling of dustiness pervades the production. Words occasionally drift in from voice-over or from Courier text projected onto a lumpy screen as if typed; the latter is less heavy-handed than it sounds.

Bonenfant constructs important images that flop and jerk their way through eerie tunes as if propelled by outside forces. A séance of four, for instance, seated round a floating table, becomes a violent dance performed with hands rather than feet. She returns to a visual theme from her past work, tethering dancers together (recalling a joined-at-the-hip pair from her "Etymology of a Person" or the entire theme of her perhaps-inevitable "Tethered"), but then builds on it in a surprising twist for a memorable final scene, deftly combining the elegance of stage magic with the visceral revulsion of vomit. (This, the critic realizes, is not the kind of quote that does the struggling artist much promotional service, but we must have truth.)

Among the ensemble, it would be tempting to call the character of the Medium the lead, in part because of her most singular character function, in part because she gets the flashiest role and in part because she wears the most impressive hat. In a way, this is the rare construction where the greatest opportunity to show off may not be the actor's friend; the full-body choreography of dance and the stage afforded to everyone else is replaced by restrictions-entrapment under velvet robes, and the requirement to taking a cue from the cinema and act only with one's eyes. Last seen with the company as an irresistible charm factory in 2006's Fringe Festival knockout "Aspiration: Housewife", Vanessa Hardy defies cliché as the Medium, recasting the spiritual experience not as a transcendent brush with God but a draining marathon on human terms. She expertly flits and flickers her eyelids in dutiful acquiescence to the rules on playing a possessed character, and she jerks and cracks like a pro, but don't let the technique distract you from the interpretation: her Medium is tired, and has been dragged through this set of hoops once too often. If she knows what precisely she's going through, dance will be no way to tell us, and she might consider it just as spiritually rewarding to be left alone for a bit.

But dance, like the transcendent, resists intellectualization; you can bring ideas to it, but you can't stand back and turn it into an idea in the way that books and plays and films so resolutely suffer. You must confront what you're seeing and figure it out later.

That's why it's no surprise that the standout elements of the show are the Fox sisters themselves, who were at the center of all this from the get-go. Longtime company members Rachel Borgman and Kristina Walton turn in their most memorable work yet, and bring me back to the theme of anachronism. Anyone who's watched a period film know that some people look like they belong in the past and some don't. Borgman and Walton don't come off as another century's people, but as our own playing dress-up, and watching them bend and clutch and explore in their long, prim purple gowns, savvy modern girls in proper ladies' dresses, we recall youth gleefully pulling old frocks out of an antique trunk in the attic, pretending to go where physics says they can't. What the world hoped to get from the Fox sisters in Hydesville, who's to say. What "Ectospasms"' Fox sisters get (or at least give) is an adventure of consciousness, and we witness Borgman's exquisite grace and Walton's childlike strength not as proofs of transformed psyches but revelations of what was there all the time. When the lights come up, we don't remember them in connection with the visions, but, in interesting but inessential convergence with historical fact, as two sisters cooped up inside an old house, wondering where the next mystery is coming from.