by Gregory King, Visiting Assistant Professor of Dance at Swarthmore College for the Dance Journal
When I think of my own lineage, I am often left with holes in my story. I struggle to connect many dots, trying to find comfort in piecing together the puzzle of my ancestral legacy.
In an attempt to shed light on her own heritage, choreographer and director Jeanine McCain, left no stones unturned in Under Her Skin – a mélange of interactive installations that told the very personal story of her great grandmother who lived with a secret that she took to her grave.
Shown at the Performance Garage and as a part of the Philadelphia Fringe Festival, Under Her Skin asked the audience to board a train that would take them on a journey through mountains of memories and untold vintage stories. McCain intentionally transported the viewer with her clever undertaking of excavating her clan’s past in a six-part installation.
Although there were many stops along the tunnel of McCain’s past, stops two and three wrapped their arms around me and refused to let go. A woman in black sat on a stool and lightly played with a rosary. With boxes all around her, she maneuvered from one to the next performing the vulnerable task of revealing their contents. As I watched her interaction with each box, I was reminded of a jewelry box my mother housed atop her dresser with many unworn necklaces and bracelets nestled in its velvet shell, begging to belong to someone’s skin.
The station labeled “Laundry Line” had the faint smell of mothballs. Silky lace undergarments hung from lines as a parade of onlookers casually strolled through the dangling apparels. A birth certificate, a report card, a wedding announcement, an obituary, and a death certificate were also visible at this station. There, the echo of someone’s existence was either hung out to dry or left to wave in the wind.
After experiencing the installation titled “Portraits” on the final leg of the excursion, the audience was asked to sit and watch while six dancers in white undergarments became the backdrop to a black and white video projection. The stern gaze of the still dancers was reminiscent of a camera capturing a trice – an image that will live past its time and serve as proof that they were there. The visual of moving images running across the bodies of still performers created an eerie interconnection of the past and present living harmoniously in a frame.
The video ended and the dancers’ torso initiated movements, sharp gestures, and vocalization, shepherding the viewer along the pathway of hidden secrets, fond memories, and abbreviated stories.
The success of this piece was not in virtuosic dancing or high tech sets, but in the storytelling and the interactive installations. I was grateful to McCain for her generous offering as I left the theatre thinking about the contents of the box I would leave behind, and the story it would tell.
As a choreographer, his works have been commissioned by Transformer Station (Cleveland, OH), Georgian Court University (Lakewood, NY), Texas Ballet Theatre School (Dallas, TX), Indiana University (Bloomington, IN), The Ammerman Center for Arts and Technology 16th Biennial Symposium (New London, CT), Current Sessions (New York, NY), and SPACES Gallery (Cleveland, OH), and presented at Dixon Place (New York, NY), The Kennedy Center (Washington D.C.), and Playhouse Square (Cleveland, OH).
He has taught master classes, lectures, and workshops nationally and internationally. He has served as dance faculty for Texas Ballet Theatre and Boston Ballet, as well as visiting assistant professor of dance at Temple University, and Swarthmore College.
King is a dance writer for The Dance Enthusiast, ThINKingDANCE, The Philadelphia Dance Journal, CHOICE Review, and Broad Street Review. Mr. King’s response to the Dancing for Justice Philadelphia event, was published in Conversations Across the Field of Dance Studies and cited in the U. S. Department of Arts and Culture’s 2016 resource guide, Art Became the Oxygen. In 2020 King was awarded a See Chicago Dance Critical Writing Fellowship and was invited to present his research at The University of Auckland, New Zealand.
In addition to having served on the dance review board for the National Endowment for the Arts, King was nominated for a Governor’s Award for the Arts in Ohio and was recently appointed to the Board of OhioDance. He was the 2018 recipient of the Outstanding Creative Contribution award from the Division of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at Kent State University, and served as Provost Faculty Associate for the academic year 2019- 2020. Mr. King is a tenure track professor of dance at Kent State where he serves as the artistic director of the Kent Dance Ensemble.
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