In Part 1 of this entry, I discussed the experiential, process-oriented structure of thinkdance pieces, which might be puzzling to someone new to thinkdance or new to modern dance, in general.  In this blog entry, I thought I might attempt to tackle another challenging aspect of the work, namely the disturbing, dark and traumatic themes that emerge in just about every thinkdance piece.  This was certainly illustrated in Toby’s discussion (“A Whole Dollar Worth of Waterboarding”) of the juxtoposition of humor and torture in the current work in progress.

In my personal experience of Jill’s work, I don’t often find the traumatic content laced with humor, be it a lone woman wandering amidst devastation-internal or external (“Embers”), a figure repeatedly smashing into a wall, a woman being beaten by a gang (“Rupture”), or a disconcerting, surgical procedure conducted on its conscious patient (“Pulling the Wool”).   The traumatic acts played out are presented unflinchingly, and they convey senseless suffering, pain not as a means to transformation, but pain, lonely disconnection and destructive acts as states of human existence and the result of human systems in our times.   The pieces are laden with absurdity and the intensely disturbing sequences are often followed by humor.

Jill captures the feeling of absurdity and unreality connected to very traumatic events.  At the same time, she immerses you just as intensely in the joy, sentiment, and vitality of life in its details of sensory experience: the soft, lusciousness of roses emerging from her smiling mouth (“Fragile”), the crackle of egg shells underfoot (“Rupture”), a group of dancers moving like a frisky, barking bunch of canines (“I Cut The Rug In My Day”), and the rich, humor of the characters we meet in life.  As in real-life trauma, in Jill’s pieces lives are broken, but somehow the pleasures and the everyday details of life continue: at some point, we still laugh, we still sing, we still dance.

Fragile 1999 Nicolas deCloedt