'Site Works' production gets in your face

"Site Works: Dance on Tour" is a sweaty, intellectually challenging piece of dance theater that is sometimes chilling, often provocative, sometimes funny and ultimately thrillingly original.

Choreographed by both professors and students in the Department of Dance and Theatre at Southeast Missouri State University, "Site Works" will be presented today through Saturday at four different locations in Southeast Missouri.

Paul Zmolek, an assistant professor of theater and dance, is the artistic coordinator, with Rhonda Weller-Stilson providing the street-wise, rough-and-ready costumes. The stage manager is Jennifer Pinkley.

Dance instructor-choreographer Josephine Zmolek sets an intense mood from the start with the 20-minute "Sphere of Influence," in which the audience sits or stands face-to-face with the dancers. Sometimes the dancers speak words written by authors from the German era, the Wiemar Republic, that gave rise to the Nazi Party.

"We live in a moment, a flux, a process," they say, almost whispering.

This is a physically demanding dance in which the performers provide their own accompaniment. They slap tuned plastic tubes called boom whackers against their bodies, and their robotic movements eventually graduate to an all-out race that mimics the whirlpool they speak of. Where will it stop, you wonder. Goose bumps are allowed.

At one point, the duct tape Americans recently found a new use for is applied to mouths. The dancers are still speaking, but the audience can't tell what they are saying, save for one left unmuzzled, who leads them in a different direction and ultimately to take up a healing chant.

"Sphere of Influence" is a mediation, perhaps, on democracy in which free speech is not really free, and on the urgency of deciding how we are to be.

The dancers are Heather Connell, Meagan Edmonds, Medina Glenn, Josh Littrell, Janel Mason, Katharine M. Stricker and James VonDielingen.

"Bend into a Friend," choreographed by Heather Connell, is one of four student-created works in the production. Dancers Zakia Chandler-El, Stephen Fister and Janel Mason soundlessly demonstrate various supporting techniques that show off their athleticism. Fister's ease on the floor makes you wish more male athletes play football and dance.

Another student dance is Katharine M. Stricker's "Commune; pieta no. 6," in which Chandler-El, Fister, Glenn, Littrell, VonDielingen and Carrie Hunter fight, fall and resurrect each other.

Tonya Lynn and Adam Rutledge choreographed "Centripety," a dance that employs swords, daggers and stage combat techniques. They begin dancing individually and then become combatants and partners. The clashing of the blades blends with the percussion accompaniment.

Casee Hagan dances solo to her own untitled work, with Edmonds and Dan Graul providing a cappella accompaniment. This is working without a net, and all three perform admirably.

Paul Zmolek choreographed "Alone Together." Clare Crouch joins Connell, Edmonds, Glenn, Littrell, Mason, Stricker and VonDielingen in this work that begins with whispers so low the audience can't hear them, then half-sentences that at first seem to make no sense, then coalesce with the dancers' movements.

The dancers helped create this work by talking about and expressing the movements of "firsts" in their lives.

Part of the challenge of "Site Works" lies in the different surfaces the dancers must contend with. At Riverfront Park, which is inside the floodwall downtown, it will be cobblestones, at the River Campus the concrete at the old handball court. The 20 dancers, a number of them primarily actors, are spent at the end. They and this performance are harbingers of the remarkable places where the university's new marriage of theater and dance can go.