The back of the stage set for Tania Isaac's Standpipe featured clotheslines draped with laundry. Hanging linens occasionally served as video screens, but the prop may also be perceived as a metaphor for the piece overall, in which Isaac airs her views of what it means to grow up in a Third World country. She is coming clean with what she feels is the real deal, as opposed to what outsiders may think. Early on she says, in a voiceover track, that growing up in such a place "was not always as hard as it is simply different."

Isaac hails from St. Lucia, West Indies. The place still conjures up fond memories for her, as evidenced in dance segments that emote a sense of enjoyment in the simplicity of life. Several of the sequences feature women in flowing cotton skirts gaily undulating their torsos and heartily shuffling their feet while balancing baskets on their heads or carrying aluminum buckets to and from an imaginary standpipe. The women may be engaged in ordinary tasks, yet they are happy just to be in one another's company and to live in a land where sunshine and buoyant music abound. Even so, Isaac, who in a voiceover admits to being "stuck between romance and reality," is aware that politics and economics may complicate matters. In one telling scene, a small parachute drops a package marked "Better Life in a Box" that gets opened by a trio of schoolchildren. The box contains colorful buckets and business suits with the word "Property" plastered across the back. The trio dons the suits and dances with the buckets, but soon their movements falter --they drop to the floor and the buckets become like traps on their feet. Later the cast performs a dance steeped in primal ritualism where arms brush the floor and later reach to the sky to indicate an intrinsic connection to earth as well as a search for higher meaning.

It is in these dance segments, and when the voiceovers are poetic, that Standpipe is most successful. However, in the few instances when Isaac's text is strident and tinged with anger, it feels like preachy fist-pounding. Other than that quibble — which prudent editing could easily remedy — the production represents an ambitious accomplishment. Isaac's movement — an intriguing blend of Caribbean and postmodern gesture — combined with her knack for creating artful atmospheres make for a powerfully expressive piece.

Standpipe Oct. 21, Tania Isaac Dance, Painted Bride Art Center