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Two suitors vie for the attention of a woman who approaches one, then the other, and then rises into the air, borne aloft on a bolt of fabric. She dances as if seemingly weightless while the suitors admire — or maybe lie in wait. When she returns to earth, they carry her off. Is it adulation or possession? Something’s off. Something doesn’t feel quite right.
The mythological character here is Morgan Le Fay (Jillian Marchenko) of Arthurian legend, and the suitors (Benjamin Coalter and Nicholas Strange) stand-ins for all the men in those stories who wanted her. But it’s like the disembodied voice of Eurydice (voiced by Cole Whitmore), from Greek mythology, says. In that old story, they say that Eurydice seduced Orpheus. Eurydice reminds us, however, that it’s Orpheus who told the story. “He sang everything,” she says.
“I was just me,” she continues. “Being seduced? That was his choice.”
Loom — playing at the theater at Educational Center for the Arts on the corner of Orange and Audubon June 28 and 29 — is a production of Air Temple Arts, an aerial dance, circus and movement studio in Woodbridge. It offers classes to students of all ages in contortion, acrobatics, juggling, hand balancing, Chinese pole, aerial hoop, and trapeze. But under the direction of Air Temple Arts founder Stacey Strange, the studio also puts on theater productions that incorporate aerial dance and other circus techniques with narration to tell a story, to moving effect.
Loom, written and directed by Strange, revisits the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. In the story, Orpheus was a poet and musician of uncanny ability whose wife Eurydice died on their wedding night. Orpheus couldn’t accept her loss, and journeyed to the underworld, the ancient Greeks’ land of the dead, to ask the god Hades to give her back to him. Hades agreed, but with a catch. Orpheus had to leave the underworld at once and believe that Eurydice would be following right behind him. If he turned around to look, he would lose her. Orpheus agreed, and sang and played his way back to the surface — but never really knowing if she was there. At the last moment, the surface in sight, he succumbed to his doubts. He turned around to see that she was indeed there, but then, because he had failed Hades’s test, he lost her again.
Loom turns the story of Orpheus inside out by giving voice and exhilarating movement to Eurydice. “That’s the name my parents gave me,” she intones. “It means justice, wide and vast.” And by speaking now, she aims to get some of it, not just for herself, but for all women, mythological and real. “They always start my story with the end,” she says. “They don’t remember the parts he” — meaning Orpheus — “didn’t tell them.”
For instance, that she didn’t really need to be saved in the first place. “It wasn’t so bad underground,” she says.
Loom thus ably connects the story of Eurydice to the stories of women throughout mythology and folklore, asking the poignant questions of what could happen if we gave these characters a chance to act for themselves. So it turns Rapunzel (Casey Kogut) into a princess who doesn’t need a befuddled prince’s help to get out of her tower. The beaming smile on her face conveys as much as her exuberant movement.
Sylvie Moran similarly soars as Ozwiena, a Slavic goddess who suffers misunderstanding.
Jillian Marchenko and Benjamin Coalter connect in a way that turns physical attraction into a liability, as Marchenko embodies the doomed prophet Cassandra of Greek mythology and Coulter takes on the role of Apollo, who in this retelling uses her and casts her aside.
Strange herself takes to the air as a selkie, a woman from the mythology of the British Isles who could turn into a seal.
All of these stories are woven together — metaphor completely intended — by the Fates, who make the connections from one story to the next clear.
“His music was so beautiful that it lit the world,” they say of Orpheus, but in his grief, “he took all the light with him when it was done.” Addressing Orpheus directly, they say, “you could have left so much more — for them, for me, for you.”
Then they dig a little deeper. “Here’s what we know, what all women know,” the Fates say. “We are the ones who shape stories. We are the ones who pull the thread through. We have told all, woven all. Now all that remains is to let go.”
Loom is a powerful piece of theater, with a pointed argument for more voice and freedom for women that never gets preachy. Instead, through its pared-down script and particularly through the dancers’ transporting movements, it offers a glimpse of the better world that could be.
Loom plays at ACES ECA Arts Hall, June 28 at 8 p.m. and June 29 at 1 p.m. and 7 p.m. For tickets and more information, visit Air Temple Arts’s website here.
