Vanish (2001)
Photo:
Commissioned by the Scotia Festival of Music in Halifax, Nova Scotia
Premiere: Scotia Festival of Music, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada, June 2001
Choreography: Rebecca Lazier in Collaboration with Performers
Music: Arnold Schoenberg, String Trio Op 45
Music Performance: Fred Sherry, Mark Fewer, Stephan Dan
Performers: Renée Archibald, Lillian Bitkoff, Rebecca Good, Jennifer Lafferty, Layard Thompson, Daryl Owens, Christopher Williams
Duration: 18 minutes
Development: Funded by major grant from Canada Council for the Arts
Performed: The Kitchen, NY; Princeton University, NJ
Vanish is an extravagant and detailed physical kaleidoscope where bodies fly across space and lurch onto each other. Beneath the music of alternating frenzied and soothing strings Vanish creates a world where the dancers abandon gravity with breathtaking lightness.
“Lazier arranged these pliable, hyperactive bodies in attractive disorder… showed more of the choreographer’s intelligent, fine control of complex material.”
“‘Vanish’ opens the door into Lazier’s choreographic realm, defining her vocabulary of movement with its gutsy sweeps of arms and legs and its space-eating leaps and dives. A kaleidoscope of charged movement, ‘Vanish’ lives up to its name, with the dancers silhouetted against the vanishing light, their arms reaching for the sky…”
“Lazier work a kinetic triumph. ‘Vanish’ created an entire geography of gesture out of a thousand blades of grass. Schöenberg anticipated her method in the way he integrated precisely poised musical detail into a whole as stoutly packed as the nucleus of the atom. The choreography was extreme in its athleticism, not the athleticism of acrobats, but a dynamic yoga of movingly human twists and turns, leaps and slides, which animated and articulated the stage with a breathtaking physical kaleidoscope of folding and unfolding arms, legs, feet, hands, torsos and heads, all of it strikingly integrated into the musical design of Schoenberg’s score.”
