Word: clearfield
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Closer to home, Beth Soll and Company will perform "Clearfield," a silent dance opera that was presented earlier this spring at the Institute for Contemporary Dance, in the Agassiz House living room on Friday and Saturday at 8 p.m. It's free, and good, so get three early...
...work by the same choreographer every few months, and to note what impressions remain the same, leaving imprints of the artist's style. This weekend at MIT local choreographer Beth Soll presented "Map," and as in "Clearfield," her piece performed earlier this spring, she was cavorting off to the side of the action like some imperious imp. But a performing persona is only one aspect of style; more interesting to see is how Soll's choreography transcends this way of moving...
Funny too that both works--"Clearfield," with its avant'garde conventions of blankly-staring dancers' faces and seeming arbitrary actions, and "The Tree of Life," with its tidy presentation of thematic unity--should have the same effect: the lovely ambiguity of not knowing exactly what the piece was about, and wanting to see it again. In other words, intelligent dancing...
Soll subtitled "Clearfield" a "silent dance opera;" avant-garde choreographer Meredith Monk, who appeared at the Loeb last year, uses the same term to describe her art. In Monk's works there seems to exist a deeply-felt controlling image beyond the shifting motifs of the dance surface. I didn't sense any single undertow of meaning in "Clearfield," though perhaps Soll intended one. Rather, it seemed as if the dance began and ended in stillness, its images like whispers heard above a soft drone...
...EVEN TEMPO of changes in movement quality and the unvarying level of intensity in execution anchor the multiplicity of surface motifs in "Clearfield." The only larger sense of form seems to be increasing differentiation. In the first half Soll remains separate from her four companions, who change off in duets, trios, and quartets. In the second part she begins to interact with the others; the quartet breaks up and the choreography becomes more diffuse as each performer defines a sphere of his own. In this latter section there are deliberate breaks in the monotone of the first half. The dancers...