Finishing the Hat

Oguri, Morleigh Steinberg, Dani Lunn, Roxanne Steinberg. Photo: Steven Gunther 2012.

Cold Dream Color, a dance piece from Morleigh Steinberg and her international collaborators Arcane Collective, is one of those bold works that attempts to translate a physical object d’art into a performance piece. It’s not an unusual strategy, but one that can produce a myriad of results. Paintings have long been a popular choice for the stage and film. Figurative works often invite the introduction of narrative, producing results ranging from The Girl With the Pearl Earring to Sunday in the Park with George. It doesn’t have to be that way though. There are approaches that are more purely visual in their tenor going as far as the kind of tableau vivant found at the Pageant of the Masters each summer in Laguna Beach. Cold Dream Color, which opened at CalArts REDCAT theater downtown on Wednesday, is somewhere in between. It’s a dance piece performed by Steinberg and six other members of Arcane Collective based on the paintings of 20th-century Irish artist Louis Le Brocquy who died less than one month ago. The work features choreography by Steinberg along with Liz Roche and Los Angeles-based dancer Oguri and an original soundtrack composed by Paul Chavez and U2’s The Edge. The goal is to evoke the images and feeling of Le Brocquy's painting while incorporating physical movement and the passage of time, though not necessarily narrative.

Morleigh and her dancers do construct some amazing images. And even more remarkable is how strongly they evoke so many specific visual images from Le Brocquy’s often abstract paintings across his seven-decade career. Not unlike the paintings of his friend Francis Bacon, Le Brocquy’s image world is filled with deconstructed bodies in muted non-flesh colors. Dance might not seem to be the easiest format to recreate this visual sense but Morleigh does so, both by relying on sets and lighting that add little color to the made-up ashen faces of the dancers, but also by relying on a movement vocabulary that is constrained, slow, and sometimes epileptic in its gracefulness. Things rarely boil over into speedy fleet footedness, and dancers collapse, roll, and writhe as if falling from the sky or hobbled. The works five sections can produce some unnerving recreations at times like a open mouth, the only clearly visible body feature on a dancer behind a sheer curtain. At one point a dancer waves a huge black flag over both dancers and the audience, passing just a foot or two away from various heads at times. Dancers wander into frame from behind more of these same hazily lit curtains all to a soundtrack with ethereal electric guitar noise that at times succeeds in creating a hypnotic state for the audience.

It’s all very attractive and a fitting recreation of the artist’s image world if the evening, which was sold out on Wednesday, did evoke a sometimes overly serious air. Humorous moments are very few and abstraction is the rule rather than the exception. And in this abstraction Cold Dream Color is more akin than not to tableau vivant despite the dancers' movements and the passing of time in the 90-minute program. The show repeats through Sunday downtown and considering how popular its been so far, you may want to get your tickets in advance.