Timeless Themes on a Responsive Stage: NobleMotion Presents CHANT

The first thing I appreciated about viewing CHANT – the latest performance from Andy and Dionne Noble’s prolific NobleMotion company –  is the way the performance just started. Nothing was announced to the audience and nothing in the environment changed but the diminishment of the house lights. The three cocoon or pod or husk-like structures – created by scenic designer German Cardenas-Alaminos – still hung center, left, and right of the stage. The purpley-peachy lights by lighting designer Brian Ealey continued to play along the floor, taking sideways approaches. Two sculptures held space in the back of the stage where the black curtain never rose nor fell. A third sculpture stood ready and declarative; six horizontally askew horns affixed to two wires extending from the dark flyspace to two small white melamine-covered cubes on the floor. 

The two posterior sculptures followed a similar design with objects upheld by wires connecting white cubes and the blackbox ether. The sculpture to the audience’s left has three wires while the one to the right has two. The objects in these pieces are stones in horizontal pairs that get larger as the wire approaches the floor. The distance between the sets of stones shrinks as the wire descends, and these two elements – the growing size and the shrinking distance – create an accelerating cascade that suggests, well, several things, among them waterfalls, or water dripping and pooling over rocks in a damp cave. 

In CHANT, I continuely found triads. Some were actual, some plausible, all ripe for allegory. There were three hanging pods, three wire sculptures. There were three categories of sculpture: rock, air, and…husk? There were three categories of people. There were broadly three modes or spaces that the stage seems to home in this piece. The first was cavelike, where the stones are both wall and water, the husks remnants or reposing states of critters, beings, that used the cave before the people arrived. The sounds of this space are echoed, but near. Sometimes breathy or scratchy, often a droning hum. The lights suggested water, or wind blown over sand. 

The function of the cave setting is the creation of a community, and this is how the dance begins. As I said, the dancers arrived as soon as the house lights went down, entering from the wings with the quietude of monks, while the two large pods began to glow. On the floor, an eye-shaped constellation of lights formed under the central pod, and there the character that the Nobles called “The Originator” gave the show its first vocalization. The Originator was the flawless choral singer and Doctor of Musical Arts, Kari Francis. She represented feminine, motherly elements, growth, unity, and reassurance. She was one of the three types of people in CHANT, and she was coupled with the masculine element embodied by self-proclaimed jack-of-all-trades, vocalist Steven Bogard. His role wasn’t to be the other half of The Originator, but to maintain cosmic balance. His actions were often of warning, and he perhaps personified the horn sculpture on stag; important in their capacity to call out, but ultimately capable of naught but noise. The dancers made up the third category of humans, and while human they were, they were also inchoate; their purpose at first was merely to learn. In the cave setting, the dancers follow the example of the Originator, her white robes and gentle encouragement making her a faultless guiding light. 

The second broad purpose served by the space was a place of expression, where the dancers were the active element, having moments of play, of questioning, of discovery. There was less following, more variety. Even so, they were still absolutely a unit, not only sharing weight and movement as dancers do, but sometimes seeming to share energy with each other in acts of mutual dependence. In this space the lighting became linear, creating a grid on the floor. Perhaps this was where the dancers, the group, learned to organize communal activities, learned to codify activities and beliefs. The Originator and the masculine element were still present and often contributing in this environment, but they were not mimicked or followed. Here, the sculptures seemed to stand for a variety of objects in the world that the group interacted not so much with but around. They investigated the pods from a distance, and played with the horns without touching them.

The third state of the space was one of work. Sometimes it was the work of fighting for order and unity in chaos, sometimes it was about turn-taking and problem-solving. Always it felt compulsory. Aurally, this state was often accompanied by loud whistles and cacophanous voices while visually the floor was jagged bands of light in black, white, and red. The sculptures blast warnings and fall faster and faster from the sky. 

There are exceptions to these three scenarios, places where they flip or merge and the lines get lost, and I could have the masculine element thing all wrong. What I am pretty sure of is that if you see CHANT this weekend – August 21 and 22 at the MATCH, 8 PM – you will notice truisms about human behavior. How we seek meaning and guidance and reassurance. How we seem to be made for a number of contradictory purposes. How we learn and make and destroy without end.

A note on what I didn’t see in this performance: there was what looked like a large lightboard center stage right in front of the audience. I thought of it as the source of light, or water, or something that the Originator valued and shared and returned to throughout the dance. While I could tell that the colors changed on the board in a flowy way, that was all I could see. The board might have been an important element to the thematic staging: a husk, wire sculpture, light board triad of stage materials. It might have had more of a role in the action or mood of the dance, but it wasn’t visible from the middle of the audience, two-thirds of the way up. 

Another thing I didn’t “see” is the immediacy of the interplay between dancers, sound, and light. I know that the sculptures were wired with sensors to translate vocal and physical actions into sonic and visual data, but, for better or worse, collaborator Badie Khaleghian’s systems are so seamless that you would need to be a part of the process or attend multiple evenings with a sharp eye and ear to notice the work that was happening in real time.

I’m always happy to return to the cave and to human threats to humans with the Nobles. It is great to see some of my favorite dancers in Houston be part of such multi-layered work, both thematically and artistically. I hope readers will see CHANT and will have such a strong take on it that they put it in the comments!