Dance - In a Giving Mood

Duende Dance Theater’s Offering invests in the future

Shortly before Amanda Exley Lower gave birth to her son, I attended a ritual of welcome and offering held in the baby’s honor. Lower is the artistic director of Duende Dance Theater, so the ceremony was hosted by Several Dancers Core, in one of its Decatur studios. The guests being who they were — dancers, singers and other artists — the gifts included artistic offerings: dances by Jhon Stronks and Lower herself; songs by Elizabeth Dishman and Amanda’s husband, David; testimonies from old friends. I read a poem assuring the baby that the entire universe did, just as he suspected, revolve around him.

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Baby Matthew is 8 months old now, and his mom is about to throw a much grander ritual of offering, presenting Atlanta with gifts from 18 dancers and three additional performers in a multimedia, text-laced, evening-length dance titled Offering.

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The work opens with a video showing images of the World Trade Center, the war in Afghanistan, Hurricane Katrina and other “things that have touched me over the last five years,” says Lower. Knowing a little something about Lower’s politics and her anguish over the state of the world under the heel of the neo-con agenda’s hawkish zeal, I ask whether she had any misgivings about bringing a new child into this world.

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“You know, I didn’t,” she says. “I’ve not given up on us and on humanity. ... Maybe I just feel like now’s the time to work a little harder or to remind us of some of the things we’ve kind of forgotten. ... I just hope the piece affirms this natural instinct I think we have of wanting to care for each other and offer a helping hand.”

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That said, Offering is no Pollyanna piece. Lower is well aware of what we’re up against. In one solo, Sarah Evens dances with a mass of pennies, casting them about, gathering them to her again. The other performers, seeing her wealth, ask her for a penny, ask her for another penny, want more and more and more until she has nothing left. And in a poem about the hard, thankless work of cleaning up after a war, optimism that we can finally put it all behind us is tempered by the inevitability that forgetfulness will make way for the next foolish war to come.

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Still, there is hope and love. Blake Dalton and Erin Weller dance a duet of slow, tender, easy, nestling love. Six-year-old Nicole teaches the audience a Bollywood dance. Most of the cast members ham it up, high-school-dance style, to Paul McCartney’s “Silly Love Songs,” then later hold hands and perform a traditional folk circle dance.

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So what does any of that have to do with saving the world or making it a better place for baby Matthew?

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“Ultimately, I guess the whole piece is an offering of dance as something that is a celebration of life, a celebration of the human body and its ability to communicate our human existence,” says Lower. “When we experience pain and grief, how we find connection — like through partnering work — and joy — like Nicole skipping across the stage — to me, it’s so honest and so present and in the moment. ... Dance is something that I think can help us weather these storms and tragedies and come together to try to figure out the best solutions, so that we can all help our neighbors instead of turning a blind eye. Maybe we can have talks about things instead of rushing into violence, and here, I guess, I launch into my political hopes: that we would find alternatives to war because we can connect to the pain that that causes.”

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It’s one of the hallmarks of all psychopaths (some of them presently running nations) that they have an underdeveloped sense of empathy.

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If a dance can educate our empathy, that’s a great gift, indeed.