Reflecting on Visible Seams

This blog post is by Drew Barker, Graduate Student and MLS Candidate.

If you’re not paying attention, you’ll miss the beginning — however, this dance piece will demand your attention soon enough. What starts with the dinging of a bell quickly scales stairs and then ushers you outside only to look back in at a space you have never seen in such a way. Ladies in bright colors dance/run down corridors, pause, revel in a modern arabesque with arms churning, and then disappear around a corner. Visible Seams is a dance piece choreographed by MFA candidate Erin Crawley-Woods which utilizes the interior and exterior of the Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center in ways epic and sensual.

Crawley-Woods blends an entertaining sense of humor with a swaying meditation on human relations.

Designated audience viewpoints contract, telescope, and stretch our line of sight while also exploring a space that people often carelessly walk through every day. Alternately alluding to Busby Berkeley and Pina Bausch, Crawley-Woods blends an entertaining sense of humor with a swaying meditation on human relations. Other moments are punctuated with a wiggling hair bow, a door slam, and even once or twice with a sigh.

If not marveling or smiling at how the dancers were moving, audiences attempt to anticipate what will come next. More than anything it seems they definitely do not expect — or want — the dance to end. If you have the pleasure of seeing this piece, the dancers will etch their presence upon places in the Center you may have never noticed, allowing you the potential to re-imagine the performance the next time you walk by that staircase, that window, that reflection.