Savage/Love is not a play as much as a display of everything
you already know about that thing called love, if you’ll only admit it.
The script is a collection of improvisational poems written
by Sam Shepard and Joseph Chaikin, performed by the talented De Facto Dance
Company with the help of wordless tropes like musical chairs, bullfighting,
ballroom dance, punch and judy, feints, mime, frozen poses, swordplay,
clowning, spooning, deep embraces and the many expressions of separation.
And then there are the words.
Instead of eharmony,
think edisharmony. Put MTV’s Girlcode
alongside the WWE and there you have it, honest and dishonest in the same
breath or movement. More than
anything, this performance makes clear that like Kubler-Ross’s five stages of
grief there are stages to love, except in Savage/Love they’re not linear,
they’re shuffled, and the roles keep changing, today master, tomorrow
slave. The only impossible thing is to
truly see the other.
Cirque du Soleil has a performance
in which a man and woman engage high above the crowd in a spinning
death-defying tightrope act and everyone in the audience who has lived
recognizes in it a metaphor for the danger of relationship. No one dies in Savage/Love, but everyone’s
wounded. It sounds solemn, but it’s also
really comic and truthful.
The words conceal and reveal. The dance expresses the attitudes of love – a
constant shuttling between the intense desire to be saved from myself by love
to a retreat into myself from this suddenly incomprehensible thing – love, with
you. “The murder without a weapon…”
The troupe of actors is dressed in
primary colors to stress the rainbow of fundamentals they embody. There is some multimedia, especially one
notably effective moment with a scarf and a projected image.
What better to express all of this
than the elusive dream of a dance?
Savage/Love
is presented by De
Facto Dance and will be presented at HERE, 145 6th Ave
Director:
George Russell
Featuring:
Leah Christine, Kelly Donovan, Meg Fry, Meagan Kensil, Charley Layton, Sydney
Matthews, Wayne Maugans, George Russell & Jordan Smith
Original
Music by Seth Clayton; Video Projections by Adam Meeks;
Lighting
by Karsten Otto
Press Contact: Sydney S Matthews
Sydney.S.Matthews@gmail.com| 949.702.2633
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