Fever Pitch

One Philly dance troupe lets imagination carry it to the farthest corners of reality.

by A.D. Amorosi

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Published: Feb 16, 2010

[ dance ]

Picture this: Frenetic, sweaty lonely-hearts swarm a dancefloor, propelled by steely club music. A woman considers the risks and rewards of having an FDA-approved memory chip implanted into her already-surgically-enhanced body.

Welcome to Ardmore's Indigenous Pitch Dance Collective, where imagination is the ultimate source of inspiration. To execute such feats, founder Lisa Welsh and executive director Nicole LaBonde have made it their business — since IPDC's start in 2006 — to take dance to a whole new level. "What IPDC images is a world where the arts are valued not just as an aesthetic form, but as a therapeutic, transformational force," says LaBonde. "Zata is really going to show that."

In both directors' opinion, technology in the 21st century has made the world a smaller place — one that needs such transformation. "With information and technology bombarding us daily, it can bring out the best in us or drive us apart. Whether in a club where bodies crash into one another, lonely for real contact, or in a futuristic factory where data-filled memory chips are manufactured, the future of humanity hangs in the balance," says Welsh in reference to the two dance stories that make up Zata: Stephen Welsh's Gray Matters and Curt Haworth's Human Candles.

According to Welsh, Haworth's concern for the human spirit, a desire for touch and the blank unholy future is accessed in Human Candles. He's working with a crush of bodies in clubs whose "ambitions and angst" portray loneliness and the need for human contact in a sea of frustrating isolation. "That's captured in the pedestrian and mixed into an athletic movement vocabulary that carries a non-literal narrative," says Welsh of Human Candles' busy look of frenetic running and colliding and its sound of beeping, pulsing house music.

(CLICK IMAGE FOR LARGER VERSION)

The moves behind Stephen Welsh's Gray Matters show an increasingly mechanized world through quirky, seamless choreography. "One of the influences would be commercials offering to surgically 'enhance' any part of the human body," says Stephen, Lisa Welsh's husband. "Memory-enhancing implants seem inevitable. Yet what happens to our humanity when we can simply encode information into our brains without having to acquire information the way mankind has always done?"Gray Matters is dark-humored and dialogue-driven with dreamlike atmospheric shifts between the principal female dancer's mental and physical reflections on the medical procedure at hand (e.g. Will this surgery really improve her?) and the actual clinic where customized microchips are produced. There's a bunch of props and assembly-line moves; the choreography is meant to blur the line between full-throttle dancing and topical theater, with neither art form shortchanged.

"Curt and Stephen seem to be examining different sides of the same coin," claims Welsh. "Where Curt examines the need for genuine human contact in the urban swell of anonymous people, Stephen suggests a world moving away from human experiential learning toward artificial intelligence."

Going back to their show's title — "zata," fittingly, means "imagine" in the African dialect of Hausa — and how it fits into the present, LaBonde laughs as she puts it all into perspective. "Most of our imagining has to do with the future. Did [the ancients] ever imagine clubs and brain chips? Humans always seem to achieve amazing, unthinkable things, for better or for worse."

(a_amorosi@citypaper.net)

Fri., Feb. 19, 8 p.m.; Sat., Feb. 20, 2 and 8 p.m.; $20, Painted Bride Art Center, 230 Vine St., 610-642-4630, indigenouspitch.org.

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