"From Here - Mountain Tales, Mom
Troubles, and Talking Dances"
By Ferda Mehmet, student intern of CHASS College Computing
 The
Department of Dance presented From Here on May 1-3
at 8:00 P.M. in the ARTS Building Performance Lab.
The hour-long performance presented three new solos
by choreographer and performer Shawn Womack. The
dances merged Womack’s interests in choreography,
writing and personal stories while playing with
questions about memory, place and identity. Having
grown up in Riverside, Womack provided the audience
with a way for seeing dance in relation to memory,
various histories, place, present circumstances,
shifting, and shifty identities related to the city.
From Here allowed identity to burrow inside movement
and text as it wriggled, writhed, snuck or lunged
forth into a prism of bodily images.
The first piece presented by Womack, “I’m No Beauty,”
was a solo that demonstrated choreographed movement, spoken narratives,
video imagery, and recorded narratives of Riverside’s Mt.
Rubidoux. Pushing on the notion that the landmark is a space of
contained wilderness, Womack personified it as a rough-tough woman
squeezed and clamped by pushy backyards. The Tens, the second
solo, was performed by Riverside native and dancer Jennifer Twilley.
Her moving and sounding conversation with cellist Josh Aerie culled
and re-patterned from memories of danced and played experiences
of the performers’ past. The final solo, Mom Troubles, featured
Womack splicing fictionalized and true accounts of troubled mothers
and mothers in trouble. It sedimented notions of the white suburban
mother, which at times appeared as a documentary of two particular
women who garnered recent media attention. |