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Tiffany Mills Company 'Tomorrow's Legs'
March 6, 2010 -- Dance Place, Washington, DC “Tomorrow’s Legs,” by the Tiffany Mills Company, qualifies as one more addition to the blended dance/theater pieces that seem to be ubiquitous lately. In this work, Tiffany Mills, with “generous input” from her company, presently consisting of four dancers – Jeffrey Duval, Luke Gutgsell, Whitney Tucker, and Petra van Noort – cleverly explores the nature of memory and loss by seamlessly integrating text with movement. “Tomorrow’s Legs” was created during a residency provided by the Joyce Theater Foundation in New York City, and it premiered at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in February 2009. The one-hour work begins with the house lights up. The company’s dancers, all casually dressed, toss oranges from hand to hand to hand to hand, creating a zigzag from one back corner of the stage to the other. Van Noort, who is last in the receiving line, piles the oranges in a wheelbarrow. There’s something strangely satisfying about the sound of the oranges smacking the dancers’ palms and the occasional thunk of a poorly thrown orange hitting the floor, accompanied by muffled giggles. The music is eclectic (tunes by the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Shocking Blue, L.E.D., Night Ark, and David Bowie are featured), but the real accompaniment is the text, which dramaturge Peter S. Petralia helped to fashion. There are four main stories, and each is told by one of the company’s dancers. In telling their stories, the dancers move the audience as they move their bodies. First up for sharing a personal and tragic tale is Duval. He relates his childhood memory of learning of his brother’s death. Lasagna plays a role in this memory, as do oranges, and the audience has been prepared for the presence of each, since the oranges from the introduction are still visible on the stage when the story begins, and van Noort has just read aloud a lasagna recipe. Although Tucker states, impatiently, after van Noort has announced how to make lasagna, “I don’t understand what this has to do with anything,” as the work begins to unfold we catch on, slowly, that all of the memories are tied together somehow.
The theme of one’s own memories not being indulged by others recurs throughout the work. Who really listens when we talk about the meaningful times in our lives? In Gutgsell’s story, there is a blindfold. Fellow dancers cover his mouth and interrupt him as he tries to speak. He is telling about an incident of molestation when he was young, but no one wants to hear his tale. Not even his mother, we learn. In a later section, a dancer forgets the name of van Noort’s teenage boyfriend, and she is annoyed. Another theme in “Tomorrow’s Legs” involving memory has to do with truth. How accurate are our memories? Over time, what do we lose? What are we left with? Tucker relates, for example, that she learned in a phone call with her mother that the dog she remembered being horribly hurt was not actually the family dog and that the neighbor didn’t maliciously injure the animal, it was caught in a fox trap. She estimates that only 6%-7% of her story was true as she had constructed it. Van Noort crawls as if actively seeking to recover her memory. She speaks about her first love, first heartbreak, and the tiny plastic swan trinket that triggers those precious memories for her. The oranges make a comeback. They’re unpeeled and squeezed. The juice runs into a martini glass, the excess caught by a napkin. “Does anyone want some?” Tucker asks the audience. No, we’re already sated with their memories. We’re asked more questions, “Is it possible for you to treat someone in a way you haven’t been treated?” “What does ‘Tomorrow’s Legs’ mean?” “How do we remember?” The dancers lob some answers at us. They remember through watching, gmail, closing one’s eyes, looking at something. The wheelbarrow of oranges is dumped, and fruit floods the stage. (Having fruit on the stage seems to be a trend lately, too. I’ve seen apples and tomatoes and now oranges strewn onstage!). Here, all of the dancers finally let loose, without words, but the quartet’s dancing feels odd. While the words they used pack emotional power, the raw dancing doesn’t deliver quite the same energy. I applaud Mills’ beautifully composed work, but I have to wonder about the dance/theater combination. The dancers sometimes seem to be merely reading aloud and not often enough dancing aloud. To make “Tomorrow’s Legs” really take off, the dancers could use the vulnerability they relate so well through their stories and make it echo more strongly in both their words and movement. In a very fundamental way, we are all actors and dancers. We talk and move every day. To be extraordinary performers, dancers in a theater-driven work should strive to make dance a visceral part of the experience and play with language so that it dances.
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by Carmel Morgan
The dancers pile atop each other as they pile on the stories, like so many layers of lasagna, the “consolation hot dish.” In addition to the layering of bodies and stories, we see layers of grief expressed through memory – denial, anger, guilt, hope. The physical intertwining of the dancers exemplifies the mental exercise of returning to a painful event. As Tucker shares her story of a childhood dog that was cruelly injured by a neighbor, she dances in and around a circle of clear plastic cups. She tosses herself up and down, toppling the various formations in which she had carefully placed the cups. They scatter across the stage and are later brushed away by dancers with brooms, a visual representation of memories being carelessly swept aside by others.