MOTHER, a new hour-long spectacle by Andrea Miller and the dancers of GALLIM, is at once a trippy chronicle of planetary creation and a vision of social harmony expressed with imaginative lyrical force. In this intergalactic disco, Miller has captured the essence of wonder.
Tender and magical and often funny, MOTHER is set ‘in the primeval present’, per program notes, in which the dancers ‘exude traces of genesis’. That imagery was potent. The curtain rose on a lone woman in a deep birthing squat common to many indigenous cultures. Elsewhere, the ensemble flitted about like pollinators, thrusting jagged arms toward a stationary dancer. And in a highly engineered mid-air penetration, dancers lifted a comrade in a split toward another airborne dancer, gliding her front leg through the V of the other dancer’s legs. All this was executed with equal parts solemnity and serenity.
The ensemble of nine delicately yet resolutely picked their way across a stark white otherworldly landscape. They were wrapped in paper-thin unitards, the extraordinary creations of Orly Anan, like spray-painted second skins marked by shimmering blobs of color that resembled starburst galaxies as imaged by the Hubble Space Telescope. These shifted a pantone in the stunning stage washes by Vinnie Vigilante that ranged from vibrant pinks and neon oranges to hints of dusk that cast the dancers in silhouette and a violent chalky yellow that suggested air pollution. Even their faces gleamed in changing hues of gold.
There was a feral immediacy to their dancing but also a smooth, cool detachment. As they constructed a world, bodies undulated like silk, assumed the crouching tiger stance and evoked sea anemones with tailbones anchored into the floor, strong cores keeping legs and arms afloat. Backs arched to extremes, the pillowy acrobatics of MOMIX without the f/x, the nuzzling of a partner all had an air of scientific exploration rather than eroticism. The dancers would hold hands and form pulsing shapes like paramecia, or take lilting steps forward and back in a hand-held line, their sternums lifted to the sky with an earnestness and air of majesty that sparked inexplicable joy in me.
Frédéric Despierre’s mercurial electronic score seemed to slow down or speed up time and create weather from which the dancers would sometimes seek shelter in each other’s arms. Occasionally one would howl bravely into the void.
MOTHER echoes an Indigenous worldview in which rituals are not just symbolic acts but acts of creation: each encounter onstage – the grasping of hands, the gently inquisitive bumping of bodies, the tender entwinings – highlights the interdependence by which all beings continuously bring one another into existence.
The dancers would sometimes stray from the group in solos or duos. Donterreo Culp skimmed across the stage, constructing bold shapes with pulsing vitality. Donovan Reed whacked a penchée and glorious extensions. India Hobbs perched nonchalantly across Marc Anthony Gutierrez’ shoulders in a mermaid pose as he headed downstage with quiet ceremony, head bowed. She slid down then scaled his lanky body in a smooth and breathtaking duet.
Tensions ratcheted up momentarily when a figure obscured under a heap of shiny white ribbons erupted on stage. It strode and bounced about like the raffia-suited figures in the Gbetu masquerades of the Gola people of Liberia and Sierra Leone. I was also reminded of the figure in a tinsel tree costume, an adorable trickster, in Arthur Pita’s Björk Ballet for San Francisco Ballet. The costume hides the human form, marking the performer as a forest spirit. In a witty cultural nod, the material for this suit is the sort of thing that could’ve been sourced from Costco rather than from West African raffia palms.
Dancer Vivian Pakkanen shrieked and did a little dance of discovery with the spirit, who engulfed her in its bristling pelt. The spirit did not seem unfriendly, though, and from its depths emerged the petite figure of India Hobbs – another echo of the Gbetu masquerade in which the raffia mound releases a small figure meant to symbolize the continued issuance of life from mysterious connections with nature and one’s ancestors. Hobbs’ character appeared to be learning to walk, though she was born with a fierce développé à la seconde.
To close, Miller transported her otherworldly crew into a more human dimension with the aid of Patrick Watson’s ambient-lounge ballad “Melody Noir.” With its slow Latin sway, the dancers’ languorous moves and close encounters took on a more sexy feel. Somewhat hilariously, the spirit reemerged with part of her shaggy costume dangling off one shoulder, while another dancer gaily waved a big chunk of it, and a third undulated like a sea anemone. It seemed as if the primeval world, the spirit world and the backstage worlds had all collided in a Little Bang.
