Y'all Weekly Dance: Support Systems
Y'all Weekly Dance: Support Systems
Audrey Baran and Erin Rose Coffin's Tiny Dances, December 10-11 at Petra's in Charlotte
In the newest show from Baran Dance, conflict and comfort occupy the same space.
Who: Audrey Baran and Erin Rose Coffin
What: Baran Dance presents Tiny Dances 2022: BD X ERC
Where: Petra's 1919 Commonwealth Avenue, Charlotte, NC
When: Two Nights!
1st Performance: Saturday, December 10th Doors: 7pm | Show: 8pm
2nd Performance: Sunday, December 11th Doors: 5pm | Show: 6pm
Tickets: $15 Advance | $18 Day Of • 21+ with valid ID
What began this summer as a conversation between choreographer Audrey Baran and poet Erin Rose Coffin evolved into Tiny Dances, scheduled to be performed this weekend at Petra’s in Plaza Midwood. The sequence of six brief pieces draws inspiration from Coffin’s poetry. The poems, each one read aloud by the poet to introduce the dance it inspired, are whole and thought provoking. They echo and resonate in each following dance, simultaneously underpinning and opposing the choreographers’ narratives. Across the six performances, a meditation on the inseparability of burden and support is the through line. In this way, the pairings illuminate one other.
Baran founded her Charlotte-based company in 2012. With an MFA from Hollins University’s prestigious dance program, she has consistently provided high caliber contemporary dance works to the Charlotte community and beyond. In her body of work, she seeks collaboration not only with other choreographers and dancers, but also creators of every stripe. Baran is guided by an instinct that, “by cross pollinating and creating interdisciplinary projects together, our…works only get richer and more multifaceted.” Tiny Dances, unified by its many conversations, is a testament to the success of this approach.
From the dual titles of the poems and dances, to the poetic content versus the choreography, to the movement between the dancers themselves, there is constant tension and harmony. “Did you know / ravel and unravel / mean the same thing?” Coffin asks in “Worn,” the first poem in the show. The dance is performed by Baran, whose solo evokes the life of woven thread. Her fingertips rub and sense each other, limbs creating loops and dissolving them as they join and disconnect. She is joined on stage by her husband, musician Mark Baran, playing a harmonic meditation by Jorge Cardoso which, in its own turn, weaves in and out of itself in Baroque solemnity.
The duet “Wait,” performed with desperate sincerity by dancers Melissa Jesse and Carolina Quiros, stands as the strongest complement to its poetic counterpart. Coffin’s poem, entitled “In the Shower, When Your Marriage is Finally Over,” paints a stark scene of a moment alone. Its speaker is simply checking in with themselves, working their minute body parts, seeking reassuring reminders that they are real.
“let the water pool in your mouth, push / it back out. unclench your fists. / run your tongue over your teeth.”
They are alone, both vulnerable and indomitable as they perform this rediscovery. The poem takes place after a breakup, while the dance takes place in the midst. Jesse and Quiros embrace and struggle, now calm, now anguished. Over kaleidoscopic piano from Son Lux, ecstasy and duty are on flitting display as they form support systems for one another with their interlocked arms. Apart, they search their own bodies for each other. Together, they shift back and forth across the line between offering and obligation, acting out the short emotional attention span of failing partnership.
Coffin says that her unpublished poem “Repurpose” is a memory of the most affordable Ikea bed frame she could find.
She flexed sunburned shoulders,
wrenched away woodenplanks barely held together
in the first place, cheapfurniture purchased and ruined
in the same season.
She uses the broken bed to build a garden. “Revelation” reframes its source material in turn. Performed with riveting certainty by soloist Akilah Edwards, the dance finds a Black woman in perfect makeup, jewelry, and a flowing wig. She lounges on an upholstered chair in the throes of exhaustion, miming suffocation, unable to stay upright.
Then, gradually, the character changes. Taking control, she rejects the confinement of her costuming. Her body and face begin to move with familiar signals of calm and happiness as she finds the physical vocabulary of self care. Relief pours over her, the acting performance as strong as the dance itself. Perhaps what she shed was once useful to her, but unfettered, her joy blossoms.
In “Totality,” a poem about 2017’s total solar eclipse, Coffin ruminates on something more distant from herself. Both the dance and the poem are a break from the personal tone of the other pieces, yet systems of support and dialogue are as present here as in the rest. The speaker addresses the moon directly, defining it by how it changes the sun. “You are so loud,” they say to the silent eclipse. Its dance is called “As One.” In jeans and camis, dancers Raquelah Conyers, Sharon Dunson, and Danielle Roman move with the inscrutable authority of heavenly bodies. They work in tandem with undulating, phasing music over a thick beat, taking turns in repetitive movement. Growing, pushing, swirling like a violent wind, they take note of each other, testing each other as if gaining interest. Suddenly, they find a hypnotic synchronicity, as of a system that has suddenly learned itself.
Coffin, whose poems go deep rather than long, said that collaborating with Baran Dance was a joy. “Poems usually live on the page, or maybe in the air during a reading,” she wrote to me. “Getting to sit back and watch them take on a life of their own…is a once-in-a-lifetime gift that Baran Dance has given me.” The satisfaction the poet feels about these works seems present in everyone I watched at the rehearsal last week, and one cannot help but feel that Baran’s collaborative mission fosters it. It drives the process in her studio as well. Jherrymiah Go, who performs Baran’s choreography in “Scramble, but make it Sparkle,” was the choreographer for the show’s conclusion, “Sweet Sorrow.” Carolina Quiros, half of the arresting duo that performed “Wait,” choreographed Akilah Edwards in “Revelation.”
As Baran told me, this company’s process is even more fluid. “The performers contributed to the choreographic process, either through conversation, improvisation, or movement generation,” she said. “We always work…collaboratively, even if there is one main choreographer for each work.” Collaboration is complex. The themes of support, tension, mutual labor, influence, and companionship in this slate of new pieces by Baran Dance are so deep and present because of the trust that these artists have given one another so wholly. By its nature, the result is inspirational.
Attend Tiny Dances to see them all perform this weekend, and it may just rub off on you.
