Chances are you’ve seen advertisements forShadowlandfloating around the city for a while now. On the back of cabs and the walls of bus shelters, something that looks like a person… but not quite. Something both monstrous and intriguing. The production is a stunning collaboration between dancer and image, shadow and form, and as artistic director Michael Tracy suggests, the end result is like something from a dream. Images combine to form unexpected, fleeting figures, while the story itself is carnival-like and strange. Suffice to say, it sounds like a hell of a show.
“It’s a coming-of-age story of a girl who is leaving her family for the first time, a young person trying to find herself,” Tracy tells me, fitting for a man who was born in Florence, grew up in New England, and now directs dance company Pilobolus around the world. “And it’s told through techniques of shadows, these huge projections of 12 dancers behind a large screen. It doesn’t have text, but it still has a clear narrative that runs through the show, this story that is funny and scary and interesting. It’s kind of a fairytale, with a dreamlike quality that tells the story of this girl’s misadventures.”
The dreamlike description seems very appropriate. After all, when we are first exposed to shadow play in our lives it is usually on the verge of sleep, as a family member demonstrates how to fashion a bestiary of moving images on our bedroom walls. Pilobolus takes the idea further.
“We’ve long been known for combining bodies into elusive imagery, things that might just as easily appear to be a tree or an animal as much as human beings onstage,” says Tracy. “But now with these projections, it’s pretty amazing to see 12 people roll onto the stage and form a shape that suddenly emerges as a giant elephant that carries on through the rest of the scene. Even though I’ve seen it a hundred times now, it’s still just as fun. And it’s demanding. You’d think things like this would be relatively simple, like a child’s game. But it’s hard work, and the dancers rehearse every day to make sure the shapes look good and can be understood.
“After 40 years we’re still finding things the human body can do that we hadn’t thought of before. You’d think that there’s a finite number of positions that the body can go into and ways it can move, but the kinds of interactions between people, the meaning and the sense of it can be infinite. We have several rotations of cast just to keep people fresh and keep the performance alive. Each combination changes the story a little, so on a given night you can see quite a different story from the night before.”
The blend of dance and shadow allows this strange magic to come to life, with the possibility of endless interpretation and revelation. After all, the best kind of legerdemain is when you are entertained and hoodwinked simultaneously.
“Shadows are an illusion made by the body, whereas dance is just the body itself. In combining them, you have an image that is quite believable that still somehow seems to shift before your eyes, the same effect you would get at a magic show … So that’s why we’ve included these shadows that tell this strange story, where the simplest movement between two or three people can tell a different kind of story with a different kind of power.”
SeeShadowland at the State Theatrefrom Tuesday June 17 until Friday June 20, tickets available through Ticketmaster.
