Following the Breath with Group Acorde

As a former New Orleanian and New Yorker, I’ve lost track of how many natural and man-made disasters I’ve endured. Sometime between the COVID-19 pandemic and my first prescription for amlodipine and atorvastatin, I realized that the constant feeling of fight or flight was not only unproductive but could send me to the emergency room. So, I got smart. I started meditating, which is all about following the breath and finding a middle way between anxiety and empathy. 

This regenerative power of breathing was explored by Houston dance and live-music performance company Group Acorde in its recent run of Gasp. The evening-length performance combined two complementary works: Inperson (2017), choreographed by Anat Grigorio; and Gasp, with movement created collaboratively by Group Acorde founders Roberta Paixao Cortes and Linsdey McGill, and guest artist Dawn Dippel, set to an original score by Houston keyboardist Andrew Lienhard. 

Group Acorde has a long history of producing collaborations between its dancers and guest musicians. As a composer who has worked closely with choreographers, I believe a new dance deserves a new score, and I know from firsthand experience that creating such a work from the ground up takes time and trust. That Gasp began with Lienhard’s commissioned chamber jazz score for piano, upright bass, and tenor saxophone speaks to the high level of respect Group Acorde has for the power of original music. 

The evening began shortly after the scheduled start time. Audience members gathered in the lobby were ushered into Matchbox 2, where saxophonist James Murphy and dancer Lindsey McGill were already on a dark, fog-filled stage lit by a blend of purple and white spotlights. Murphy possesses a magisterial tone that calls to mind the late, great Arnett Cobb and other celebrated “Texas tenors.” Onstage, releasing an onslaught of jarring, truncated phrases at top volume and breathing life into what is, acoustically speaking, a “dead” room, he was a heroic presence. In contrast, McGill lingered nearby, looking disheveled and bewildered, only to periodically and suddenly rush at Murphy and throw her arms around his neck and rest her head on his shoulder, or grip and tug at his right arm like an impatient child as he continued playing and fingering his horn with the left. 

This business went on for a while, until Murphy made his way offstage to be replaced by Paixao Cortes, a doppelgänger for McGill. Sticking close to the floor like a pair of insects, the duo’s strange, disjointed, and physically taxing movements aligned in a feat of spooky supernatural cohesion and were executed mostly in silence, until their breathing became increasingly labored. Thomas Helton, appearing at stage right with his upright bass, stood and watched as the pair split apart, with Paixao Cortes, her hair in her face like Samara in The Ring, now disconnected from McGill, whose anxious breathing escalated to panic. Helton, now accompanied by Murphy, created a soft bed of droning tones as McGill started singing, in a quivering, frightened voice, “You are my sunshine / My only sunshine . . .” It was a moment with potential for some serious eyerolling, but at that point, I had been vicariously sensitized to what the dancers were experiencing physically onstage and couldn’t help but feel this lone person’s plight. Later that evening, I thought about how easily our capacity for empathy is often obstructed by the anxiety-arousing quality of another person’s distress. More often than not, we find some way to ignore and get away from a person, especially a stranger, who is in obvious emotional distress. God forbid you get any of that on you, right? At the conclusion of Inperson, when Paixao Cortes carried McGill’s limp body offstage, and the curtains closed, you could hear the audience exhale a genuine sigh of relief. 

Gasp began with the curtains parting just enough to frame Paixao Cortes, stretching and turning in full ballerina mode. Dippel, the evening’s guest artist, made her way from the audience to the stage, entering the scene like a stranger in a strange land. The curtains then opened completely, revealing the dancers and musicians in a landscape of detritus, including stringless cellos, the amputated fingerboard and headstock of a double bass, and the rusty, razor-sharp guts of a piano. A long bolt of nearly translucent fabric was stretched at length downstage, like the baptismal river in Alvin Ailey’s Revelations, or perhaps the breath of our ancestors. The trio of dancers, dressed in layers of fabric that looked as light as air, immediately called to my mind the three graces of ancient Greece. Their collective presence and classically inspired movements were a welcome sight in such a dystopian landscape.  (The broken instruments onstage were retrieved by Helton in the wake of Hurricane Harvey.) There were even several moments when the dancers smiled at each other or by themselves. 

Lienhard’s score, performed by Murphy, bassist Helton, and pianist Pelayo Parlade, is a programmatic suite of short, rhythmically complex yet concise moments, with titles referencing the healing power of breath as well as the terror of losing it. Lienhard and the musicians are highly adept at playing a wide range of jazz styles, but there is very little musical improvisation in Gasp. Murphy’s and Helton’s instruments often switched their traditional roles as melody and bass accompaniment, respectively, while Pelayo kept things grounded and moving forward, with unpredictable chordal interjections, droning ostinatos, and gentle, child-like melodies. That said, I would have loved to have heard this score in a much more resonant, acoustically friendly space and witness the resulting physical impact on the dancers. 

If some moments in the second half of the program were more head-scratching than heady, it was not for a lack of skill and commitment on the part of the musicians and dancers. Throughout the performance, there was always something interesting to look at and listen to, and with concepts, choreography, and composition this ambitious, it felt just fine to go with the flow, even as I wondered at times where the dancers were trying to take us. I sense that Gasp has the potential to develop a stronger, dramatic arc without losing any of its mysterious, dream-like atmosphere. (I can imagine it staged as an immersive experience, with the audience moving freely through its landscape.) 

As the earth continues to burn, and our collective empathy for those displaced by weather and violence seemingly at a premium, Group Acorde is regenerating the spirit of audiences who can imagine a better future.