The pulsing hook of Ionne’s “The Last Time” reverberated through the speakers at Lilly’s Pad, the upstairs stage at Toad’s Place. Dancer Tadea Martin-Gonzalez struck a pose, then moved from it, her actions graceful and strong. As the beat churned to life, Ionne himself (a.k.a. Maurice Harris) sang the first few lines, clear, concise, mixing mournfulness and hope. “All we ever feared / Was killing time / Several hundred years / Amount to / Castles that we’ll never own / And songs I write / But cannot sing myself / Our dreams of spaceships / And their secret plans / To take us somewhere else.”
It was the second of Ionne’s “excitals,” a show that combined visual art, music, and dance into a party with a message. It was the result of both collaboration — with dancers Martin-Gonzalez and Talia Grynberg Schepis, as well as the visual artists in The Collective NHV — and of Harris looking inward, first, to write and release the music from his second album, Fracture, and second, to bring it to life on a stage.
Fracture is an album that connects the personal with the political, social, and environmental; a song about dissolution can be understood on one level as chronicling the end of a personal relationship, and on another level as commenting on humanity’s fractious relationship with the environment, or for that matter, with itself. At home, in headphones, Fracture can inspire contemplation of the connections Harris makes. Live, however, Harris showed that the urgent songs on Fracture translate to the dance floor. The rhythms that lend urgency to the songs’ despair and glimmers of hope that follow turned easily into club-worthy jams.
Harris leaned all the way into the futuristic vision of his music with his accompanying visuals. Digitally gritty videos flickered behind and around him, as he donned a costume featuring a helmet with tubes extending from the back that evoked both dreadlocks and a cluster of severed air hoses, as though he was an alien who had crash-landed and cut himself from his pod before it exploded. Martin-Gonzalez — and, later in the show, Grynberg Schepis, beaming in on video — embodied the invitation to dance, even to the album’s more somber songs. But Harris needed only to raise a beckoning hand to get the audience on its feet. He gave them a small breather with “Me Alone,” a searing, melancholy number, and then brought them back up again with two simple words (“let’s dance”) and the party continued.
On the dance floor, Harris showed that the music was enough to convey his message. He insisted that we plunge headlong into the toughest questions we face, as individuals, as a society, and as human beings living on a planet in peril. But the music and its ability to get people to shake their hips also reminded the audience that such work could be done in a spirit of life-affirming positivity. We were stronger if we tackled the questions together.
