Out from the Shadows Dec 7, 2011

By Jim Demetre

Choreographer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey’s latest work, A Crack in Everything, is a stunning reminder of what dance is and always has been: a ritual performance that gives physical expression to our most fundamental cosmological investigations.
 
But what’s remarkable is how Scofield’s movement takes form on a series of spatial planes that emerge and recede as the work unfolds upon its varied multi-dimensional tracks. Shuey’s elaborate set is a matrix of reflections, projections, and shadows on glossy and textured surfaces that continually shift our understanding of depth and sensory perception.
 
Combined, Scofield’s bodies and Shuey’s stagecraft take us beyond the immediacy of our surroundings, breaking down and informing our sense of the larger world. Like the freed prisoners described by Socrates in Plato’s Allegory of the Cave (Book VII of The Republic), we are left to ponder the limits of what we had been looking at beforehand.

TAGS
11/12 Season / dance / zoe|juniper