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Saturday, February 4, 2012

Theater / Dance Tonight, Salt Horse Dances for 12 Hours Straight

Posted by Brendan Kiley on Sat, Feb 4, 2012 at 12:31 PM

Salt Horse

Tonight, dance company Salt Horse will perform in and around Washington Hall for 12 hours—from 6 pm to 6 am—as an exercise for a future show.

It can be irritating when artists sell tickets to their own rehearsal/generating processes. But 1) with over 20 musicians and dancers using Washington Hall as a playground, the 12-hour marathon could produce some worthwhile spectacle, and 2) Salt Horse is a pleasantly baffling dance company with a weird, weird imagination. Their Man on the Beach was like stepping through the looking glass, with a whistling teakettle, an enormous sandpiper with human legs, a writhing creature made of black plastic tubing, and a person getting severely beaten by birds with aluminum baseball bats.

Their Titan Arum pushed even further, into an invented mythology with a disturbing queen, lots of fabric, music by Stuart Demptster, and a tiger.

Their pieces are baffling, in part, because they feel so complete and impenetrable in their strangeness. Each one is like an oddly shaped, ornately decorated box that you can admire from the outside and only wonder what it was built to contain. For Salt Horse fans, tonight's 12-hour play—which you can drop in and out of—will be an unusual opportunity to lift the lid and take a peek.

Performers include Corrie Befort, Beth Graczyk, Mark Haim, Angelina Baldoz, Stuart Dempster, Cherdonna (of Cherdonna and Lou), and a bunch of others. Details here.

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I have never seen TItan Arum performed, and maybe in person a connection is obvious, but since your review didn't mention it I'll just add that if "titan arum" sounds familiar, it's because that's the common name of Amorphophallus titanum, a giant inflorescence that smells like rotting flesh. The parent plant blooms rarely, so when specimens in botanical gardens do so, it's usually prominent in the news.

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