Review of “SALT” performed by Anne-Marie Mulgrew & Dancers Company
Painted Bride Art Center, May 23-24 2009

Salt: a mineral, a culinary seasoning, a preservative, a medicinal agent, a spiritual catalyst…the inspiration for an evening of modern dance.  The latter may well come as a surprise to many. But choreographer Anne-Marie Mulgrew has made a career garnering creativity and interesting movement from the most unlikely of sources.

Anne-Marie Mulgrew and Dancers Company (AMMDCO) celebrated its 23rd season of performance May 23-24 at the Painted Bride with SALT, inspired in part by Mark Kurlansky’s book, entitled “Salt, a World History.”  The multimedia work, presented in ten sections spread across two acts, is an exploration of the nutritional, medicinal, spiritual and, at times, sensual qualities of the commonly used mineral.  The use of several video vignettes (directed by Mulgrew and filmmaker Carmella Vassor,) combined with the sweeping, percussive and, at times, quirky movements of the dancers who, dressed all in white took turns either partnering with, navigating through or embodying the various qualities of salt.

Besides the talented dancers of the company, currently composed of Anne-Marie Mulgrew, Elrey “starchild” Belmonti, Joe Cicala, Frances Gremillion, Rebecca Patek, Leslie Ann Pike, Sydney Schneir and Kate Speer, the most prevalent character on the stage was, indeed, the salt itself.  A steady stream of the stuff continually snowed down upon the downstage corner of the performance space, constantly illuminated by a subtle spotlight.

The first section, entitled “The Awakening,” began with Belmonti, slowly and deliberately creating a border of salt that encircled the entire stage; an obviously ritualistic action made even more powerful by the presence of Joe Cicala, sifting through a large washtub full of salt, at times pausing to let it gently trickle through his fingers.

While the dancing sections gave the choreographer’s abstract perception of salt, the video sequences gave a more literal and, at times, visceral interpretation. In one section, three ladies sit in an enclosed courtyard and are treated to a blind-folded taste testing of various salted foods. Their facial expressions upon tasting each item tell the entire story.

Another sequence depicted a lone Belmonti, on the floor of a warehouse, being showered with salt from above as he writhed in slow, sensual twists and undulations.

The final onstage dancing section “Of the Earth,” brought all the performers into the space, depicting the flow, the sharpness of taste and the earthy mineralistic nature of salt through percussive foot patterns, intriguing lifts and swooping turns and spirals as they brought the evening’s journey to a close.

AMMDCO’s SALT was many things for me: an opportunity to see interesting choreography, talented performers and a reminder of how much salt can make one very thirsty after watching an entire evening dedicated to it!

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.”

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