Dance - Fractured Vessels
Lelavision plays physical music’ for laughs”
From the darkness came whispers of half words and dry-whistled wind, perhaps phantom children plotting or the foreign lessons of fairy tale creatures. Blue-green lights rose from the wings, revealing a man and a woman on their backs, gazing up at a silver circle — a moon, a planet, maybe a friendly flying saucer. The man stood, then climbed into the sky to rock inside the cradle moon, to knock pure notes from its split-tube pipes. The woman hung below him, moving through figures of musical resonance and flight.
His eyes were wide with discovery and delight. He spun his spaceship like an astronaut in boot camp, shaking out a gravelly rattle.
It was Lelavision, and co-founders Leah Mann and Ela Lamblin were riding on a suspended circular trellis of aluminum pipes in the highlight of their new show, The Vessels Project, a study of vessels from spaceships to brass bowls to pulsing veins. The show continues this weekend at 7 Stages.
This is the third show in as many years of the genre-jumping company’s “physical music,” an intellectually rich, comically playful, spiritually stimulating performance of music played by dancing with Lamblin’s sculptural instruments. At its best, Lelavision is equal measures silly and sincere: clowning spiritual messengers loosening logic with visual gags, then surprising with sublime moving sculptures of bodies and metal or the searching sounds of a vision quest.
Consider the “koola,” a cast-off Styrofoam cooler fitted with bridges and strings to make a toss-away culture’s rendition of the West African kora, a two-sided harp. Lamblin played it with the enthusiasm of a basement thrash rocker on air guitar, while Mann rolled her eyes at the ridiculousness of it all. Lamblin bopped her on the head with the koola; Mann bounced on his butt.
The lights went down, the whispers rose, then they rode the “rumitone,” a playground-style merry-go-round bristling like a battleship with musical pipes. Spinning slowly, they rubbed and knocked gentle notes from the rumitone’s tubes. The platform has a very long sustain, so Mann and Lamblin built up chords one patient note at a time. Lamblin lifted a rain stick of sorts, then poured its sand out onto the stage as they rotated, creating a rasping spiral around their tones. The movement, the music, their whirling body sculptures ... the combined creation was hypnotic.
When Lelavision gets the mixture of laughter and illumination right, they can ease an audience into entranced contemplations. We saw this last year in their Rhythm of the Landscape, which found common counts in celestial, ecological and corporeal rhythms. This year, Vessels faltered the balance with an excess of slapstick (particularly in the first act) that deconstructed many of their more serious meditations. Perhaps Lamblin and Mann didn’t trust their wiser moments; on too many occasions, they hammed it up just as something beautiful was emerging.
So much silliness inoculated the audience to later reflections, and the finer notions and motions were unable to convincingly assert themselves through the noise of too-ready laughter. At the end of her dance in the “tinkle skirt” — telephone bells affixed with long strands of spring wire to a central hoop — Mann twisted the instrument into a silver chrysalis and crawled inside like a caterpillar; the wind chime notes slowly faded away. It was a lovely moment, but several people in the audience laughed instead, over-prepped to find a wink in every pose.
While the show as a whole falls short of the thematic coherence and harmony we’ve previously seen from Lelavision, several of the individual pieces — including the spinning steel drum/dulcimer/cello “viol-cano” and a composition on two large-scale longitudinal harps — keep this fractured Vessel sound.