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DANCE OR DIE?

June 27th, 2011 by Clark Humphrey

It’s been months since I reviewed any performance art here. But thanks to the urging of Katie Johnson, I witnessedÂ The Harlequin Hipsters‘ dance/music/theatre piece Passion, Or Death. It occurred last weekend at the Hale’s Brewpub’s back room.

It’s presented by six dancer/performers (evenly split M/F), with a little music (mostly synth with a live violin and guitar) and a few snippets of monologue and dialogue. The premise, set up in these vocal interludes: A mystery illness is overtaking the whole planet. No apparent epidemiological cause. A male newscaster and a female doctor discuss the pandemic with us. The doctor sees sadness and depression as the cause, and dancing and loving as the cure. The newscaster delivers a monologue about becoming a careerist to get the material things he wants out of life, then collapses and dies.Â We’re then given theÂ moral of our story: Don’t lose yourself making money to get a house and family and fine store-bought foods. Live with Passion, like these dancers.

The color is fading from faces. What are we to do to keep alive? Merely surviving is not enough. We wish to thrive; to not only realize our dreams and passions, but become them.

In truth, it is our only hope.

At the end an enthusiastic alternative marching band (the Titanium Sporkestra) enters the room and invites the audience out into the back parking lot for a short dance party.

It was all very well executed, performed with both with and precision.

And as one who has been neither “thriving” (emotionally) nor “surviving” (fiscally) for much of the past several years, I could readily receive the show’s message.

But can I believe it?

Lots of folks don’t have the option to drop out and be bohemians. They’ve got spouses and kids. They’ve got retirement to worry about. They need health insurance. They can’t run off and join the circus (let alone start their own).

Where do the rest of us find, and healthily exploit, our respective Passions?

One Response

Katie writes:
June 28th, 20112:12 pmat

I think those of us who missed the boat of today’s young, and extremely talented and hard-working performers wish we could go back now and do it all over again. Realistically, the venues and social constructs that make it possible for them to perform now didn’t exist in our day. Many of us were pushed to either conform, or live on the streets. Some of us are lucky enough to have partners willing to cover our health insurance and other basic expenses; some of us are still all on their own, trying to figure out how to be able to retire when your whole life has been spent on you art (in your case: writing) and there is no social safety-net for artists. Let’s not begrudge them, let’s celebrate that amazing talent and energy, because it genuinely took them HARD work and hours and hours of practice to do ballet, dance, sing, aerial, martial arts, fire, and yes, even form a marching band. You still have writing (and perhaps another artistic passion?), and I am studying fire performance and doing some visual art; what it tells US, is that we must never forget to carve-out a sliver of our lives to indulge those passions. It’s easy to forget, for people in our generation, and get stuck with the grind of the mortgage and kids and college expenses and autos and oh, the list goes on and on. In sum, it inspired in me the reminder that people like us are not completely stuck beneath the wheel; we simply have to give time and priority to that part of us which wants to create art of some kind. It may not be as much as we’d like, but keeping at something is much better than abandoning it altogether. That’s when the passion does die =)