Illumination (review)

The abandoned Seaholm Power Plant looms over the shoreline of Lady Bird Town Lake in the heart of downtown Austin. High-rise condominiums and trendy bars line nearby streets, and cranes signal a bounty of construction projects underway. Yet as I drove through a chain-link fence surrounding the plant, I felt like I had left the city behind and entered an unfamiliar industrial landscape. From the outside, the art deco–style plant looked imposing, cold, and empty, but a curious blue light emanated from its upper windows. Blue Lapis Light, the Austin dance company headed by choreographer Sally Jacques, chose this unlikely spot to stage Illumination, a site-specific aerial dance.

Although Jacques has produced site-specific dance for over two decades, only recently has her work received acclaim from Austin critics, who inducted her into the Austin Arts Hall of Fame. Her company’s latest performances attempt to rewrite the map of downtown Austin by creating unexpected images of beauty in drab or pedestrian places. During the dot-com boom Intel began construction on a building downtown, but when the economic bubble burst, the building remained a half-constructed shell. In 2006, Blue Lapis Light staged Requiem in the abandoned Intel site. The piece featured dancers clad in white who appeared to fly from the top of the building and swing down its sides; they looked like angels literally flying in the sky. In 2007’s Constellation, dancers explored the space between two nondescript federal buildings in the state government core.

Postmodern choreographers and avant-garde theatre directors experimented with site-specific performance induring the 1950s and ’60s, in part to challenge the boundaries between art and life. Site-specific work extends performance outside the theatrical frame and transforms it into a vital part of the landscape. Contemporary directors and choreographers continue to create site-specific work that uses a particular location to help tell a story. For example, Deborah Warner set The Angel Project (2003) in rooms, apartment buildings, and streets throughout New York City to create an intimate journey for the spectator. In Night Light (2000), choreographer Ann Carlson used actors to restage

Opening image, inspired by the Sistine Chapel, in Illumination. Photo: Tom Athey.

Laura Cannon in Illumination. Photo: Tom Athey.

old photographs in their original locations in and around San Francisco’s Yerba Buena Center for the Arts to comment on the intertwined nature of present and past. Illumination never explicitly engaged the location’s history or story in the way Carlson’s work does. Although attention to the specific history of the plant might have created a more layered, complex performance, Illumination successfully explored space and scale, offered striking visual images and moments of spectacle, and caused the audience to see the space in a new way.

The vast interior of the Seaholm Power Plant resembles an airline hangar, but Jacques wrote in the program notes that the architecture inspired her to view the plant as “a magnificent, grand cathedral.” Enormously high ceilings captured air thick with smoke from a fog machine, and windows revealed an especially pink sunset outside. The audience sat in chairs arranged in rows while the plant’s enormous interior stretched out before them. The dancers appeared throughout the piece in varying degrees of distance from the spectator, constantly shifting the audience’s sense of scale.

Illumination offered memorable visual images and arresting moments when dancers defied gravity. At the opening, lights bathed the back of the building, which was extremely far away from the audience, in an amber glow. Seven dancers hung, suspended by cables, against the sixty-five-foot back wall like marionettes; their bodies moved slowly and not in unison. Twirling and performing back bends at a precipitously dangerous height, their shadows loomed behind them larger than their bodies, creating a sense of seeing double. The dancers could be angels, puppets, or celestial acrobats. They began to descend, hanging...