At Oz Arts
Emma Sandall’s “An Ambivalent Woman of 37”
The environment was subtle but remarkably complementary. Outside, in the OzArts hallways was an exhibit of maleness, custom-designed meershaum pipes and handcrafted humidors, all in exotic woods and other materials. The images are evocative of Sherlock Holmes or a peer of the British realm smoking fragrant burley tobacco surrounded by carefully bound books, or a gentlemen’s club where the clink of whiskey glasses accented deals and negotiations in play and change is rarely countenanced.
In the main space was an exhibit of femaleness, custom-designed audio and video fragments, dancing, narration, and live piano flourishes, sometimes driven, driving, sometimes redolent of internal ranting. Episodic segments ranged from the flight of butterflies, the biology of childbirth, the psychology of thorny life-changing choices.
At 8:02, Sandall’s tall, lithe figure dressed all in white sat on the floor near a wooden chair, reaching and stretching, in a pastiche of yoga-esque figures. Her opening narrative included segments from Sheila Heti’s book, Motherhood, the novel on which Sandall’s performance piece is based. Heti’s protagonist, a divorced writer with meager financial resources undertakes a three-year odyssey of deciding whether or not to bear a child. She often speaks to three coins that answer her rhetorical life questions in the style of ancient Chinese I Ching divination. Each coin’s value is based on whether it lands heads or tails.
Emma Sandall and Alexandra Volpi merged their striking physical presences of light and dark, of movement and music. The technology of lighting, sound, and video coalesced into a swirling work of thought-provoking intricacy, a labyrinth of paths from which each woman must choose at some pivotal point in her life.
Prior to this performance, internet technology made it possible for Sandall and composer Elena Kats Chernin to collaborate continents apart. The music eased smoothly and effectively from elaborate arpeggios, through wacky dance hall brightness, to languid tunes à la Edith Piaf . Volpi handled both the piano and dialogue adeptly. Sandall’s dancing, a mixture of modern dance and controlled physicality, resonated with the spoken text.
Some episodes were particularly effective. In “The Decision is Yours,” the video lens precisely targeted Sandall’s white-clothed abdomen as she stood upright against the backdrop. The video projected the shadow of a fetus in utero. This image was then swollen into a red balloon that moved out of her body, into the sky.
The doubt and the coins provided a thru-line, a connection to the greater universe. One phrase of the text was particularly compelling—“Whether I want children is a secret I keep from myself.” Among these moments, however, some episodes felt inexplicably disjunct. The red and black section, where Sandall’s red socks from the episode’s beginning were removed to make a red shadow puppet, was inherently interesting, but the narrative connections were not always clear.
The limited size of the performance space made it possible to hear Volpi, Belmont resident staff pianist, speak even when the microphone was initially out of order. A thorough sound check should have caught such a basic issue.
While it is important to encourage such explorations into the possibilities discovered in interweaving media elements, this piece felt “in progress,” much like shows bound for Broadway that work out the kinks in out-of-the-way venues. So while there is value in seeing the work at this stage, it would be even more valuable to see this promising work in a more polished state.
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Y Kendall is a Stanford-educated musicologist, specializing in dance history who recently earned an MFA in Creative Nonfiction at Columbia University, studying nonfiction writing with Ben Ratliff and Margo Jefferson. Kendall’s diverse works have been published in Alchemy: Journal of Translation, Columbia Journal, Mitos Magazín, The Hunger Mountain Review, and The Salt Collective, among others. Born and raised in Tennessee, Kendall now lives near Nashville, freelancing as a flutist and writer, while caregiving for relatives.
