OFFOFFOFF.COM dance:
October 6,1999
by Cheryl Pallant

"First Weekends: Meet the Artist"

Two excerpts from Shannon Hummel’s longer work-in-progress, “Down a Small Road,” explore the complexities of lifelong relationships among women living a hardscrabble existence in a remote rural community. To the mournful strains of a hillbilly banjo, the four women dancers each take their turn breaking from an upstage frieze of connecting and extended elbows and hips. This initial image conjured the blue-collar weariness in the paintings of Thomas Hart Benton. A recurring gesture is bending over with a stab of pain in the lower back. With small gesture and impressive conviction, Hummel’s dancers evoked the unadorned struggle of women trapped in lives not entirely of their own making.

The second excerpt movingly portrayed the hardships of waitresses working in a rural greasy spoon restaurant as they grind themselves to dull frustration repeating the drill of taking orders, cleaning tables, and delivering food. The dancers each take their turn collapsing on the floor in bouts of uncontrolled hysterical laughter. Significantly, without undue affection of sentiment, each crumpled victim is in turn attended to by the others and helped back on her feet, to resume the daily struggle anew.

The choreography reveals something carefully observed about nervous collapse and the bonds of friendship that perhaps are the only thing to prevent these women from succumbing to the horror of lives spent in isolated places. One waitress’s final breakdown suggests a Charlie Chaplin gone berserk with repetitive-motion-induced twitches as in “Modern Times.”

The Gowanus Arts Exchange is at 421 Fifth Avenue, off 8th Street in Park Slope, and strives to serve the multicultural communities of Park Slope, Carroll Gardens, Cobble Hill, Boerum Hill, Fort Greene, Downtown Brooklyn and Prospect Heights. Those who make the trip from Manhattan will not be turned away. If this kickoff weekend was an indication, there is great promise in subsequent offerings this fall season.