Tonight, on this Good Friday, the Northwest Film Forum will host a double sacrifice—Vernae, an hours-long performance-installation with a 30-minute dance film inspired by Stravinsky's Rite of Spring that culminates in the sacrifice of twins (Jillayne Hunter and kb Thomason of the House of ia) who are connected by a cloth umbilical cord between their spines.
Tonight's and tomorrow's performances are already sold out, but during a walk through NWFF earlier this week, as its lobby and hallways were being transformed into a cavern with a billowing nebula of fine metal mesh above and ritualistic-looking objects made of what looked like smooth white ropes here and there, director Ethan Folk said it might spill out onto the street.
If anyone passing by happens to see strange-looking individuals dressed in white who "look like cult members," Folk and collaborator Tyler Wardwell said, "it's just us."
VERNAE Teaser I : THE SACRIFICE from C D / / G H on Vimeo.
Folk has been working on this project since 2013, along with over 30 collaborators who've helped make this one-weekend-only rite for The Rite. Folk and Wardwell both wanted to share and withhold information during the walk-through but it was clear that the project has developed its own mythology and atmosphere they would rather show you than tell you about.
As far as I could tell, Vernae is partly about the formation of a community when The People (the set of performers in white) willfully surrender their individual identities to be part of a whole. That collective sacrifice is made manifest in the sacrifice of the twins. White and black, Folk says, are Vernae's symbolic hues—"white is the color of complicity," he says, the color for the proles, while black is (perhaps?) affiliated with this community's "leaders."
There will be improvisation. Some components of the performance may feel similar to the Yellow Fish Epic Durational Performance Festival. And there will be live-mixed music that chops together snippets of The Rite with field recordings, including bees. There will be lots of fresh sage from Tieton, where Vernae had a developmental residency. And there will be "goop"—black and white, of course—that will coat some of the performers and perhaps the audience.
Acts one and three are "sandbox" acts with a durational-performance feel, where people can come and go while performers walk—and perhaps suffer—among them. Act two is a "traditional" dance film with performance components. (The scare quotes are because only in this context would a dance film with performance components be considered "traditional.") And act three, Folk and Wardwell say, is a bit of a question mark. That is the act of sacrifice, and apparently the apotheosis of The People as a community—Vernae has parameters, but act three is where, as Folk puts it, "anything could happen. It will depend, he says, on how the dancers relate to the music, how the audience relates to the dancers, how the live-mixed music relates to the audience, and so on.
VERNAE Teaser III : THE PEOPLE from C D / / G H on Vimeo.
Folk looked vaguely ecstatic while talking about it. As a filmmaker, he says, he likes dancers to improv and then he can play retroactive "choreographer" in the editing room. "Absolute control," he said. But with Vernae, a live event with improvisational elements, he's going to have to do a little surrendering himself.
"That is more exciting to me," he said. "To have a goal and have it tantalizingly close, having it withheld, then having it close—I hope everybody else gets off on that as much as I do."
