'Drift': Dancers Meander Through a Bit of Food History
Choreographer Cassie Meador.
(Rich Lipski - Twp)
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Now playing at entertainment venues near you: a documentary movie and an interpretive dance that both ask the same question: Where does the food we eat come from?
Both are thought-provoking variations on a newsworthy theme. "Food, Inc." is a polemical film currently striking fear into the hearts of anyone about to eat a hamburger. "Drift," meanwhile, is a meandering piece of dance theater that leaves viewers hungry for peaches.
Cassie Meador, a seven-year veteran of the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, created "Drift" last year after receiving a local dance commissioning grant from the Kennedy Center. Saturday night, the Takoma Park-based company restaged "Drift" at Dance Place.
Like a choreographer turned archaeologist, Meador investigates how a plot of land in Augusta, Ga., evolved from a farm to a Piggly Wiggly supermarket to a church. These are not easy transitions to convey through movement, so she wrote monologues for two of her dancers. Sarah Levitt portrays a perky stock girl; Martha Wittman a rueful farm wife. Additional narrations are pumped through the speakers: A Georgia farmer enumerates the problems facing America's agricultural industry. Levitt sums up the dilemma by asking, rhetorically, why does a store in Georgia sell California peaches?
Each narration is followed by a brief dance. Meador makes excellent musical choices, but incorporated some odd fetishes and props. There's a recurring motif where the dancers raise their fists and anxiously pound the air, and several sequences that inexplicably utilize a pile of rocks.
The best moments in "Drift" are akin to good musical theater. An adorable pas de deux has Meghan Bowden and Ralph Glenmore bebopping around the Piggly Wiggly with a shopping cart. Later, the company gets down to "Right Back Where We Started From" and has a little fun tossing cereal boxes around. The party's over once the store converts to a church, but Meador doesn't plumb the spiritual transformation as she should. Nor does she provide closure. Several audience members thought the ending was intermission. But they eventually caught on and headed for the lobby, where bowls of not-quite-ripe peaches awaited.
-- Rebecca J. Ritzel
