Final Spin
Virtuosic and Visceral: Fusebox Festival's The Soul Project harnesses powers ofimprov dance and music memory
Fusebox at its best invites audiences to experience completely unique, revelatory performances that open up ideas about art and life. The Soul Project, a dance piece conceived and directed by David Zambrano, is one such event. The premise sounds simple: Seven dancers perform improvised, virtuosic solos to (mostly) American soul music.
There is no stage separating the dancers and the audience; instead, a square of white tape on the floor demarcates the dance area in the middle of the warehouse serving as the Fusebox Hub. The audience is invited to get close to the dancers, and to move around to see them from different angles.
After Zambrano explains the basics of the piece — but before the music starts — a man standing in the audience bursts into seemingly spontaneous song and dance. Everyone instantly backs away from him uncomfortably until they realize that he’s one of the dancers and not a frightening, random show-wrecker. He dances without music for a minute and ends to applause.
“That is an example,” Zambrano says. The point is made clear: Don’t be afraid to get close.
The audience obliges, spilling into the space accompanied by the familiar hits from the classic era of soul. The lights dim and a spotlight illuminates one dancer who begins to move. The audience follows, forms a circle around him and watches.
The dance itself is not easy to describe. Each dancer looks like he or she might explode at any moment — even when they move slowly, their fingers jitter and their limbs stop abruptly in complex configurations.
Zambrano pioneered what he calls the Flying-Low Dance Technique which “focuses mainly on the dancer’s relationship with the floor. [It] utilizes simple movement patterns that involve breathing, speed and the release of energy throughout the body in order to activate the relationship between the center and the joints, moving in and out of the ground more efficiently by maintaining a centered state.”
According to Zambrano, “the body is constantly spiraling, whether running or standing.” These spirals are obvious tonight as dancers spin, somersault and twist backwards onto the floor. The term “virtuosic” only begins to touch on the amount of control and precision that each soloist exhibits in the song-length improvisations.
The dancers come from all over the world — Mozambique, Slovenia, Slovakia, South Korea and Venezuela — but the music is mostly American and viscerally familiar. Not only are they soul classics, but they’re live recordings of favorites like “A Change is Gonna Come” and “Respect” that capture the raw emotion of the songs. The recorded singers wail and scream; the dancers also grunt and vocalize as they move.
The costumes are just as strange and wonderful. They evoke a post-apocalyptic tribal circus where an army vest might be slung over a sequined unitard or a shirt will be festooned with bottle caps. The dancers' absolute commitment to the music and the movement, along with the dim spotlights, transforms the vast warehouse into an intimate space.
After the performers finish their solos, they all dance simultaneously and run through the audience playing off of each other. Everyone tries to look everywhere at once, to take in everything that’s happening because as Zambrano explains, "it won’t happen again." Every night the dances are improvised and the songs play in a different order. Every night is a new performance.
These are the kinds of performances that make Fusebox, which continues until Sunday, such an exciting festival — every day offers a new chance to be blown away.
