Ma (2018)
Ma, a collaboration with choreographer Noelle Chun, was performed on March 27 and 28, 2018, at Yaw Theater in Seattle, WA. The evening-length work meditated on the ephemerality of the nature of dance. Chun questions the compulsion to make dances (art) despite the inevitable impermanence of the work and ourselves. Can this dance celebrate ephemerality? Can we embody the bittersweetness that is part and parcel of making dances and living life? The title, Ma refers to a religious-aesthetic paradigm in Japanese culture that illuminates meaningful intervals and gaps of time and space. A revealed world emptied and filled anew in each moment, nothing abides.
In Ma, dancers inhabit a world between presence and absence, practice and performance, certainty and the unknown. Veteran Seattle dancers Vanessa DeWolf, Linsyanne Owen, and Hendri Walujo channel physical and spiritual practices to open themselves to the poetics of the ever-changing moment; laboriously and serendipitously vacillating between states of full-bodied catharsis, personal gesture, and pregnant stillness. Tara Tamaribuchi responded to the concepts of the piece, movements of the dancers and drawings on an overhead projector with a mixed media, mylar stage installation that the dancers pushed around the stage, responded to in movement and drawing.
