Lucy Gellman Photo
Ten minutes into a run-through of Almost Porcelain, her feet moving frenetically across the floor, Kellie Ann Lynch looked over to the right side of the large, spare room, locking eyes with a few audience members for a single moment.
“Can you pause it?” she asked fellow dancer Alicia White, whose body had stilled for a moment by a large speaker, out of which strains of staccato, minimalist music and operatic interludes had come flying minutes earlier.
A hush fell over the dancers. Then, as if daily routine, the muffled yet needle-sharp sound of feet hitting floorboards filled the space like music. Lynch and Samantha Russell were off, bending and flying across the room.
Strange? Perhaps, if the audience had been expecting an obsessively polished performance of the 57-minute dance number, first conceived by Lynch and most recently reconfigured this year for a new ensemble. But the stop-and-start communication was de rigeur for members of the Elm City Dance Collective, who opened their studio space at Connecticut Capoeira and Dance Sunday afternoon for a live rehearsal.
Almost Porcelain is a meditation on gradated movement and gradual trust, lending itself well to an unvarnished and unapologetically vulnerable end-of-weekend performance. Members of ECDC begin the dance clutching themselves and tilting forward in a violent, hunched over gag-like motion.
They then slowly opened themselves to possibilities as they took on pair movement, which involves weight sharing …
… literally carrying each other from mistrust to trust and catching a body when it fell.
They ended with ebullient, near-flapping ensemble movement.
“If we don’t share weight, we lose that connectivity with one another,” Lynch explained of the sequence.
In its roughness was where the dance found its great beauty. Moving to music that ranged from tranquil and meditative to electric to something right out of David Lang’s scoring of La Grande Bellezza, dancers performed – – and triumphed in – – an unfettered exercise in change and modification, embracing the new with the old.
It may have struck some as meta for the troupe, which has dealt with its fair share of change while rethinking (and re-dancing) the number. Lynch has taken on the new challenge of dancing at seven months pregnant. Russell is working on conquering an evolving solo with an acute foot injury. White performed while under the weather. Placed in new configurations, the dancers were also relearning the place of their own bodies as they related to others.
“When it’s bumpy and messy and this raw, it pulls out a vulnerability in the dancers and in the dance, and I feel like that’s really important for this particular dance,” Lynch said. “It’s really interesting for me on the inside and also as an observer, because it just does something to the dancers’ presence. In a way, it’s kind of mean to go back to this place, but I appreciate being able to revisit the dance in a way that feels very new.”
She wasn’t the only one who felt a certain new energy in the room.
“I saw a lot of personal angst in the very beginning that you were taking out on each other, and it got more tender over time, which was really nice to see,” said one member of the audience.
“I think what I saw was maybe the struggle between life and death, or being together and separate … the connection between the individuals and the dancers was phenomenal,” added New Havener Mike Goldberg.
Jennifer Brubacher, who danced in the original iteration of Almost Porcelain and has since left the group, put it into even simpler terms.
“Things change, things change. It’s one of the beautiful things that we can embrace,” she said.
