BWW Reviews: Gwen Welliver's BEASTS AND PLOTS is Alive, Shifting between Portraiture and Caricature

Watching Gwen Welliver's "Beasts and Plots" is a bit like thumbing through a stranger's accidentally forsaken sketchbook. Metaphor stabs at experience, revealing a private and fanciful world in unembellished candor.

Performer Stuart Singer stirs an undercurrent of torment and frustration in a desperate and incoherent monologue. Fellow performer Beth Gill's emotionally deficient response fuels the hesitation in his ceasefire. While Singer flails across the stage, crashing into walls and screaming something unanswerable, Gill lies in wait, perching against the white paper covering the back wall, her presence meticulously controlled with a contradictorily vigilant stare. Both Gill and Singer project unfulfilled desire to be acknowledged, if not understood.

Later, as if reconciling, Mr. Singer settles down on a brown piece of paper across the stage, face down with a piece of charcoal in each hand, and sketches a rough outline of himself. He slithers beneath the paper and disappears. Ms. Gill joins him, lying facedown on the paper within the outline Mr. Singer left behind. Their bodies are still and soft, separated by the thin, rigid sheet of paper.

Performers Julia Burrer and Gwen Welliver continue the theme of tracing as they explore lines and surfaces with the dynamic precision of their limbs moving in perfect unison. They move with a quality that eerily similar, digging in and pausing at exactly the same moment, the same depth. The main difference between the two is Burrer's headgear, which is reminiscent of a unicorn's horn.

Kayvon Pourazar leads the dancers into a collective consideration of lines and length. Choosing shapes at various levels, the dancers rapidly pulse up and down in unison. Like charcoal on a piece of paper, their bodies sketch a thick and formulaic pattern across the stage. The action is a moving portrait, ceremonial yet whimsical, gently and rhythmically vibrating to the point that articles of clothing are being shed to the floor, from one momentary frame to the next.

Although categorized as a dance performance, "Beasts and Plots" accommodates several genres of performance and visual art, not as accouterments, but as key components within the work. Inspired by the work and research of Paul Klee and Oskar Schlemmer, Welliver organizes all elements of the production to frame snippets of real life and fantasy, creating a portraiture that is alive and shifting in time and space.

Photography by Ian Douglas

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