The Tiger Situation
Tonight I saw “The Tiger Situation,” a dance performance by choreographer Anna Sperber. I do not usually attend dance performances, let alone contemporary minimal performances, so my opinions on the experience are abstract, raw and without extensive knowledge of the genre. While watching the performance, I felt a range of emotions: trapped, unsure, uncomfortable, tired, engaged, curious, confused, critical, and excited.
“The Tiger Situation” began with different dancers struggling with their bodies through awkward, isolating motions: twisting, falling, hitting, and throwing. Rarely was there a sense of release, but rather like steam in a closed kettle, the energy was multiplying, contained and strained. At times, the dancers met each other in groups of two, but these moments never communicated safety or help. The dancers remained physically isolated while throwing themselves together, unable to synthesize their shapes in the way they seemingly wanted to in order to create one strong body. Their imperfect, perhaps even flawed motions seemed empty and uninteresting, lacking in any concentrated mediation or focused feeling one might expect given the minimal genre.
However, as the piece developed over time, the haphazard motions, sound, lights, and costuming began to resonate in its own repetition and build at its climax a tight cohesive unit. All the little bits and pieces of odd motion from the beginning of the piece began to repeat themselves in rhythm, consequently giving themselves the mediation and focus once thought missing. I felt a pattern: the give and take of force, the push and pull of intimacy, the need and refusal of space, the dominant and submissive, the prey and predator. Essentially, the dance communicated a series of aggressive opposites attracting and reacting in a circular pattern. I embrace these concepts abstractly as a study of form, and more specifically how the shape and energy of a body creates psychology as much as it reflects it. Take for example a fever. A terrible fever causes a claustrophobic, lucid, and painfully uncomfortable physical experience. Struggling to shake oneself out of the feverish aching of his or her body by twisting and turning only fires the condition more, multiplying the energy inside the finite, contained space of the body. It is a painful experience of trying to relax the very motion that is both the cause and the effect of the feverish state.
“The Tiger Situation” is first and foremost a dance performance. It is about physical, movement and the metaphors human bodies translate and communicate. Costumes, lighting, and sound are theoretically superfluous. However, in communicating an idea, context is essential, and context is created by space. Space is defined through a sensorial experience of sight, sound, taste, smell, and touch. The space in “The Tiger Situation” is a minimal environment suggesting abstract psychology, dark emotions, and primal experience. The small amount of light used is connected to the dancers through their costuming, at times the sequenced outfits reflect a dancing pattern of light on the floor creating a subtle, aquatic softness against the aggressive physicality of the dancer. The sound, a pulsing wall of white washed noise entering and leaving the performance at various unexplained times, is reminiscent of a static television station missing reception and creates a sense of being lost in unperceivable space. These additional sensorial elements are essential in building the contextual space of the dance, and are woven into throughout performance with careful orchestration. The dancers do not dance for the music and the music does not play for the dancers. They function together as a whole and blend together to build the performance -- an emotional void of isolated, reactive physicality.