HQ Review: “Picture Studies” presented by The Big Muddy Dance Company in collaboration with The St. Louis Symphony Orchestra
“Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt;” the famous line from the 1969 novel by Kurt Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Rules, is imagined as the protagonist's epitaph in a book which wrestles with human suffering and the fragility of life. The phrase is a contentious one, its meaning generally debated. The phrase cannot be true, of course, and yet somehow speaks to an admirable levity and optimism; a display of profound appreciation for life. Or perhaps it is a warning, a hope, or more like a longing. Everything was beautiful, and nothing hurt. The line, and all its complexity, came to mind while watching Picture Studies last weekend. The Big Muddy Dance Company performed the work in partnership with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra. Retracing the origins of this work is a little like a spiral diagram of overlapping collaborations and inspirations: composer Adam Schoenberg was invited in 2013 by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City to compose work inspired by certain pieces of visual art. Thus the first iteration of Picture Studies was born. More than ten years later The Big Muddy Dance Company has been invited to respond in movement to Schoenberg's music, which the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra brought to stunning life. Artistic Director and choreographer Kirven Douthit-Boyd notes in the program that inspiration was taken from both Schoenberg’s score and some of the original works of visual art from which they originally sprang. The result was a stunningly successful melding of artistry and disciplines.
The orchestra took up a little more than half of the stage, upstage enough to allow space in front for the dancers. The light in The Stifel Theatre was warm, bouncing off the gleaming instruments of the musicians, sitting in neat rows facing the center of stage where the conductor, Stéphane Denève, stood elevated on a small platform. The dancers entered without fanfare, walking in and scattering themselves across the stage, feet together, arms by their sides, gazes out and above our heads. A few wore simple black dresses, falling to the knee with high slits to allow for movement, sleeveless and embossed with flowers on one shoulder. Others wore sheer black knee length dresses covered in dark green, red, and gold florals, black leotards underneath. The men of the company were in similar sheer floral tops with black pants. The gold and red of their costumes echoed the gleaming walls and crimson curtain of the theater.
The first piece of music began gradually, as four dancers came to life in low sweeping gestures of the arms and legs. Eventually the others burst to life too, their movements similarly spacious and easy, mirroring the music, before standing once more with feet together and gaze out and up. The next song began, bright, bouncing, and quirky as all but a trio of dancers left the stage. There followed a series of trios, duets and solos as dancers moved on and off the stage in turns.
The dancers’ movement throughout Picture Studies seemed buoyed by the waves of sound around them and between their daring leaps and turns the forms and shapes of the dancers loosened and broke apart as they moved smoothly down to the floor and back up again, or found humble, contorted shapes. An especially humorous moment about halfway through the piece brought laughs from the otherwise quiet, enraptured audience: a male dancer entered stage and promptly collapsed to the ground. He was followed by three female dancers, looking exasperated, who encouraged the musicians to play on as they tried to rally him.
Picture Studies was playful and broad-ranging, conjuring joy and diversion with suggestions of longing shot through the choreography. The dancer’s efforts were supported by the elements all around them; the ornamented space, the music, the enraptured audience. They moved across the stage together as if propelled by a great gust of wind, or were engrossed in solos and partnerships. The culminating unison in the final moments of the piece was almost overwhelming as the stage filled with dancers again. The music swelled to a finish and seemed to soar away from us, taking the bodies with it.
The audible breaths of the dancers, the sound of footfall, the sweat flinging from turning bodies, heaving chests, the swaying heads and arms of the musicians, and the rustling of turning sheet music all became part of the transcendence of the evening; the reach, the longing. The grounded bodies served as catapults for the spirit; the dancers, intertwined with the music, extended past themselves, beyond their bodies; their vision reaching beyond their grasp.
The program provided composer Adam Schoenberg’s notes from 2013, when he was first composing Picture Studies. They included prompts such as: “joy, beauty, and depth,” “comedic,” “fierce,” “violent,” “full of love,” and “flowing.” The notes served as valuable insight into Schoenberg’s process and revealed his ambitious desire to describe a wide swath of what it means to be a human, an ambition compellingly embodied by The Big Muddy Dance Company. Schonberg’s notes end with a short sentence: “fly away.” Yes. Precisely this.