April Sellers Dance Collective's "Rumble Strips" took its audience on a high-speed journey amid the woody landscape of Eagan's Caponi Art Park over the weekend.
Titled after the safety features installed on highways to loudly vibrate if a driver veers from the path, the work jolted its viewers to attention.
To get to the first playing area, the audience walked through a streamer-adorned tunnel into a hilly clearing covered with a giant orange tarp, part of an electric-hued set and prop design by Sarah Bahr. There, dancers Rhea Speights and Alys Ayumi Ogura took turns joyously responding to the percussive sounds created by Greg Schutte on an assortment of cowbells and metal wagons.
Colorful fringe hanging from their checkered-flag shirts highlighted their arms stretching out wide between cartwheels, rolls and still moments near a birch tree, drawing life force from its roots.
Intermittently, a third dancer, neon green spandex-clad T Lavois Thiebaud, like an instigating force of an imminent accident, sprinted across the tarp, pausing to lounge on a tractor on one side, and lie face down on a pile of bricks on the other.
Whether deliberately or not, the performance offered a philosophical inquiry into the question of what comes after a near-apocalypse.
One sign between the first playing area and the second read "Be the Remnant." The audience was invited to drop wildflower seeds beneath the sign, in the dirt. What remains after the near-collapse of civilization?
Dancing, certainly. And sex.
Five performers, interspersed between scattered beds topped with hot pink and lime green mattresses, panted as they hopped up and down, making the bed springs creak rhythmically. Later, they piled all together, lifting each other up and rolling around as if in a Dionysian orgy.
The piece revealed an explicit yearning for intimacy that almost seemed frightening in its raw need. Helped along with text spoken by the dancers as well as a lyrical soundtrack performed by lead singer/guitarist Diane Miller, bassist/singer Ted Olsen and Schutte, who also sang backup, the performers chaotically strove toward a sense of community.
Choreographer April Sellers performed in the evening's final moments, toppling, with the help of Laura Selle Virtucio, one of the beds and climbing on top of it, reaching heavenward. Afterward, Miller sang the line, "Hold onto the ones you love," from her song "Ones You Love." The line evoked a startlingly poignant moment, given the context of the past 16 months. Hold on, indeed.
Sheila Regan is a Minneapolis arts journalist and critic.
