Dance that’s seasoned by pinch of innovation
May 21st, 2009 | By Dance Journal Staff | Category: Reviews
By Merilyn Jackson, For The Inquirer
If you’ve ever preserved lemons, snorted a saline solution, scoured your black spider skillet with kosher salt, or just salted something away, you know how quotidian salt is – your salary is even named after it. You use it, say it, ingest it, avoid it, and think about it, often without knowing you are, every day.
“Danger is the salt of pleasure,” explorer Sir Richard Francis Burton once said. So we could say that dance – sweaty, primal, and often dangerous – is the salt of the arts. In biology, saltation means “abrupt evolutionary change on a sudden large scale” or, you could say, a jump in the status quo. The Latin saltare means, among other things, “to dance.”
Condiment, currency, preservative, stimulant, cleanser, salt is so important to life – and to dancer-choreographer Anne-Marie Mulgrew – that she woke up one morning not long ago knowing she had to make a dance about it. This weekend, Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company will bring Salt in a leap and, literally, a heap – 100 pounds – to the stage of the Painted Bride.
“We’re using 20 pounds of rock salt and table salt alternately in the different tubs,” said Mulgrew, “and 80 pounds of table salt for the drift from the fly.”
