ARTicles vol.4 i.2c: Everett Dance Theatre’s Home Movies

Dance, Video, Memory: Four bodies enter a dark stage and move in chaos, evoking the sudden flight of a Polish family from the Nazis in 1935. Though their movements are chaotic, their bodies are always touching, refusing separation for even a moment. Silent home-video footage of an old woman is then projected against the back wall of the stage. Performer Marvin Novogrodski describes his personal pilgrimage in 2004 to his father’s childhood home in Poland, to the very street he lived in before they fled. Novogrodski met the old woman who had been their neighbor. She laughs silently into the camera as Novogrodski imitates her voice, giving us her reminiscences of his family.

Home Moviesis an interwoven narrative of abstract memories from the performers’ lives. How do you make the past present? Through the body. Memories made tangible by home-video images and the performers’ bodies responding to them through the joy of physical movement.

Home Moviespremiered in Rhode Island, September 2004. Artistic director Dorothy Jungels co-directed the piece with Aaron Jungels, who also performs with the company’s four other members. Since its conception it has toured, among others, to the Bates Dance Festival in Maine, Dance Theatre Workshop in New York and New World Theatre in Amherst.

The company has left behind a trail of blazing reviews. The New York Timesdescribed it as “an astonishingly seamless blend … more tears, laughter and poignant memory than high-tech effects.” The Village Voicedeclared that Everett Dance Theatre “weave speech, movement and video in witty and beguiling ways” and “their stories are woven together so intricately through movement that their recollections begin to seem archetypal.”

The A.R.T. and World Music/CRASHarts are delighted to present this innovative and thoughtful company, and invite you to see how riveting those old family videos hiding in the basement can be.

Rachael Rayment is a second-year dramaturgy student in the A.R.T./MXAT Institute for Advanced Theatre Training.

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