Conversations, Community, Care, Among Other Things

Conversations, Community, Care, Among Other Things

4 Corners by Karen Stokes Dance

Choreography/Direction: Karen Stokes
Performers: Brittany Bass, Bryan Bradley Peck, Michelle Reyes, Donald Sayre

I’m finding it difficult to write about this performance. It’s not that I have nothing to say, but I don’t know where to start. Usually with my dance writings, I’ll simply go through my half-legible notes (writing in the dark is hard) and try to reconstruct what I saw for my readers. 4 Corners is not so easy to report chronologically. There’s a lot going on. All the time. I say this with having had the luxury of seeing it twice.

I’ll start here. 

Giant of 20^th Century dance, Merce Cunningham, made dances without a “front.” Even if what he was making was to be presented on a standard, proscenium stage, he treated his choreography more as sculpture than as a show facing an audience. Dance has three dimensions and all sides are/should be interesting. 

I think about this often, but it especially came to mind when watching 4 Corners by Karen Stokes Dance at the Midtown Arts and Theater Complex Houston (MATCH). It is staged in the round (or to be pedantic, in the square), so of course, there is no established front, but I’ve seen plenty of dance (and theater) staged this way that still clearly played to a particular angle of the room. Even when the quartet of dancers briefly acknowledged the audience, it was without leaving anyone out. 

Using the luxury to watch 4 Corners twice, I watched it from two different angles. This confirmed my initial thoughts from the first night. I suspect that if I had the opportunity to watch it from the remaining two sides, I would still find this choreography has no front. This was one of the more successful exercises in that concept that I’ve consciously watched. 

Let’s talk about the chairs. When the audience enters the theater, four basic black folding chairs are on the corners of the stage. When the dancers first enter the space, they take their seats on the chairs and play a simple melody on handheld musical instruments that the program notes call thumb harps, also known as kalimbas. If you are unfamiliar with the sound of these instruments, I find them to have the curious ability to sound like a toy with the weight to carry emotions that can be haunting. This is our introduction to the evening. Once the dancers have completed the live music performance, they set the kalimbas aside and from that moment on, the chairs are moved around the rest of the evening. Oddly, they are almost always situated in a square, either on the corners or on the edges of a square. They are the most consistently symmetrical, geometrical aspect of the evening. When this doesn’t happen, in the instance when the chairs appear in chaotic arrangement, the effect is unsettling. 

The chairs are props for more than sitting. They are swung about in circles. They are folded and carried like schoolbooks under the arm. They are held aloft overhead like a trophy, in triumph. Or maybe in something else. I shouldn’t assume what was intended or what other audience members saw. I will tell you that the first dancer hoisted his chair overhead, I felt victory. It was a repeated gesture by each dancer until all four stop and lift their chair, unfolded, in the air. It was an instance when their faces didn’t reveal much—other moments, their faces helped us with what they were feeling—but I tell you what I felt and it was victory. Triumph. Not a violent win, but a stand taken and secured. (More on that in a bit.) 

Then, there is the section where four audience members come onstage and sit in a chair; I was one the first night I attended. I have been a performer, so being onstage is not uncomfortable for me. I continued to watch the dancers, mostly, but also occasionally noticed the reactions of the other audience members on stage with me. One seemed more uncomfortable than the others, perhaps uncertain if they were going to be asked to do anything more than sit in the light. For my part, I became envious of the one audience member who had the four dancers briefly circle them, sort of “ring around the roses” moment. I hoped they would do that to me and they never did. 

It was a different experience from other situations where I’ve been called onstage. Truly, one in this situation is usually asked to do something. Here, we were simply asked to sit as the dancers performed around us. This was a distinctly different feeling from attending an immersive performance, as one finds produced by Houston’s Open Dance Project. There, the audience is on stage with the dancers, yes, but we are free to move around. I would say I went from seeing theater in the round to having theater all around. When dancer Michelle Reyes stopped in front of me to escort me back to my audience chair in the shadows, I initially shook my head and mouthed no. I was being playful with her, but I also meant it. I didn’t want that experience to end. 

Dance vocabulary. The thing I talked about the most with people after the show was how much time the dancers spent standing on one leg. Though the most repeated motif, there were variations for the leg in the air. Hands might hold it up at the knee or it might meet resistance, the hands pressing down, or the hands might not touch the raised leg at all. There was something about suspension in these moments, obviously, but the context kept changing. The poses were so similar on the surface but the variations were there for interpretation in the moment. 

Other repeated movement vocabulary included a gesture of both hands to the left hip (at least that’s the hip I most noticed). Slowly or rapidly, sometimes the hands rested there, other times, they fairly bounced off the hip. It brought up memories so idiosyncratic that I can only guess at what the dancers were meant to convey. Then there was a repeated circle, arms around shoulders (sometimes both arms, sometimes only one) and a gentle sway—safety, care, rest, community. There are moments when a dancer is on the floor, spreadeagle, then contracts, rolls to the side and comes to standing, sometimes taking multiple tries before becoming upright. A personal favorite was a backward fall, led by the head turning, spinning into gravity. This, too, held variations, conveyed by facial expressions, body language of the torso, and the music. They were knocked back by hard emotion like grief or surprise or they were swooning as in love. Maybe. Between all of these repeated movements, there are moments that carry emotional weight from frolicsome to weariness, play to grief. 

There is sometimes in choreography a moment that grabs me and I stop breathing for the duration. 4 Corners had one such moment and it was possibly individual to me but I’ll share it nonetheless. The four dancers are linked with arms over shoulders, in a line, running. One falls out of the line and the others keep running. The fallen one recovers almost immediately as another falls. This sequence happens quickly. I’m not even certain each dancer takes a turn falling out of the line. I do know I felt something deeply in these few seconds. A stumble while others carry on, a recovery while another falls. A welcome back into the line. 

Another brief moment of note: The dancers gather. Their limbs extend stiffly, in straight lines, sometimes in parallel, sometimes intersecting. It felt like a conversation. Also, a reality check. 

A note on the costumes is in order. Ashley Horn Nott’s costumes are gorgeous pieces. The performers enter and exit with colorful outer garments that are evocative of flowing kimonos or dressing gowns but something else completely. The under garments are full body jumpers of a patterned linen material in more earthy tones. They hint at a few different cultural influences without really capturing any one costume of the world. 

The original musical score from composer Ben Morris successfully travels a number of moods for the dancers to inhabit. For a time ethereal, then more grounded with natural sounds woven into the composition. Here languid, then there pulsing with energy. 

What does all this add up to? The pre-show press talked about liminality, about time and its malleability. That is there, but something I saw was a group of humans dealing with a number of emotions, broadly, open to interpretation as modern dance will be, but what I did not see was conflict, not in a traditional sense. I do not say this as a criticism. Here I saw a community of people dealing with a range of emotional content, without anger or hatred but plenty of care. Community won without violence. Idealistic? Perhaps, but an idealism I’m personally open to, very much ready for. There is grief, hurt, disappointment aplenty in the everyday without needing a fight.  There is joy and playfulness, too. Perhaps triumph. It’s all there, woven together, inseparable. Sometimes we dance a solo, sometimes in unison, always in it together. Perhaps I’m projecting my own current state, but my particular present situations hummed with the dancers on stage. From post-show conversations, I don’t think I was alone. 

4 Corners continues through February 8 at the MATCH. Tickets here: https://matchouston.org/events/2026/4-corners