Dance - Fit to be Framed

Perhaps in response to the international silent treatment given America’s present unilateral rage, Atlanta’s dancers are inviting the neighbors back in with the one language that remained after the Babel tower’s humbling crumbling.

A few weeks ago, Beacon Dance had the whole world in its dance pants for the multiculti motion commotion Breaking New Ground at the Decatur Arts Festival. Now Amanda Exley Lower’s Duende Dance Theater calls us together for a movement meeting that is the Sunday morning revival to Beacon’s Saturday night revelry.

With a collection of small dance “portraits” and two full-length works, Framed considers frames in many ways: what they hold, what they leave out, how we frame ourselves and how we are framed.

In her panoramic viewfinder, Lower finds the followers of many movement faiths. In Framed, B-Boy Quic breakdances, Donald Brown demonstrates choreographed iaido (a discipline of the martial art aikido), Alex Spitzer dances in a motorized wheelchair. Also in the show: film by Lauren Giovannoni and Lindsey Hagan, and a live performance of Coldplay’s “Rush of Blood to the Head” by local rock band Divided Like a Saint’s.

But the masterpiece of the evening is “Even the Stones Would Cry Out,” a mournful, pleading group work that was inspired by ancient Greek statues Lower saw in a museum in Cleveland. “They’re so beautiful,” she says, “and yet they’re so lacking.” Arms missing, noses broken off. Contemplating the statues, Lower wondered whether the American age was already coming to a close, whether our finest time was behind us, our great promise never fully fulfilled. “What will we be remembered by?” she asks. “Is that all we will be?”

Inspired by those questions, Lower has created a dance that looks like an invocation, a public prayer of offering, a passion play without the resurrection. Dancers shake their hands to the heavens, strike their chests, reach out a weeping invitation to communion, bend under a weight. They move smoothly, but slowly, like rock still molten, flowing in the forms of a fine dream approaching the end of the ocean.

And then they slow still more, fighting like Michelangelo’s unfinished statues as they harden into their final forms. Members of the Central Presbyterian Choir enter and sing “O Vos Omnes.” Roughly translated from the Latin Liturgy: “All you who pass this way, look and see if there is any sorrow like my sorrow. Look and see my sorrow.”

Lower’s work has become more political (and more artistically audacious) in the past year or so, and the statues speak to how she feels about the present state of the nation. “There’s so much potential, and yet it’s stuck, it’s stone ... . It’s haunting to me to see these [statues],” she says. “Thousands of years from now, what will we look like? What will be the relics from our time?”

For now, at least, the dream still moves through Lower’s work.

Duende Dance Theater presents Framed, June 17-20 at 7 Stages, 1105 Euclid Ave. $10-$15. Thurs.-Sat., 8 p.m.; Sun., 6 p.m. Special free “Just for Kids!” performances Sat., 11 a.m. and Sun., 2 p.m. 404-377-2534. www.duendedance.org.