Life on the wire

Groundwerx's oddly beautiful sideshow

by Johnette Rodriguez

When Groundwerx Dance Theatre members Peter Bramante, Heather Ahern, Donna Meierdiercks and Cathy Nicoli began discussing a collaborative piece about the illusion of stagecraft, they decided to research early American traveling circuses and sideshows, a world that depends on magical transformations. The result is an hour-long work called The Oddity and the Ecstasy, which opens Friday night (June 12) at the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium.

Working directly with musician and vocalist Ellen Santaniello, Groundwerx dancers have created a piece that showcases their characteristic verve and vivacity but also presents some poignant, even melancholic moments. In a press preview last week at the Groundwerx studio, the dancers and Santaniello moved through sequences of workmen putting up the tent -- hammering, pulling ropes, planting a flag atop a pyramid of dancers; a clown couple on a first date; and sideshow characters and tightrope walkers.

"We looked at the magic and illusion that a circus uses not only in terms of performance, but in terms of the community-building that happens when a circus comes to town," Peter Bramante explained later. "It transforms the whole city or town that it lands in. The workers basically take an empty space and make it into something where people can suspend their everyday beliefs."

Bramante and Ahern, as the Chaplinesque couple, do just that. They follow the hair-raising action in the silent movie they are watching by leaning their whole bodies to the side, throwing their arms back behind their chairs, lurching forward, spilling drinks and popcorn. She repeatedly tugs at her skirt and gives him lip-curling smirks; he stares contritely ahead. At one point they burst out laughing together in a sustained orgasmic fit, her high-pitched giggle mimicking his low guffaw. The dancers' mime as much as their movement make this section unforgettably funny.

The sideshow characters (or "human oddities." as Santaniello terms them) are Bramante as "snake-boy," Ahern as "flipper girl" and Meierdiercks and Nicoli as Siamese twins. Interspersed with Santaniello's hilarious one-man band parade, these sections begin with the awkward movements of a disabling deformity (Ahern scooting on crossed knees, Bramante slithering armless along the floor) but quickly dissolve into abstract and fluid representations of those movements.

Bramante recounted his discovery of a PBS documentary about a Florida community of retired sideshow performers: "Their strangeness had been a skill that allowed them to earn a living. When people outside that world saw it as exploitation, many of them lost their livelihood. This idea of political correctness, of how people are treated, sometimes doesn't have the whole picture. We wanted to show that living in that world of oddness can be quite beautiful."

Thus, the "Siamese twins" first do a kind of bump-and-grind dance, linked back-to-back by their arms locked together. But later, accompanied by Santaniello, playing accordion and singing a German song about yearning not to be alone, the twins come back in skin-colored bathing suits and caps and, in dream-like partnering, lift and position each other's limbs but also move apart for short spells before realizing the inexorable emotional and spiritual bonds that keep them together as much as their physical link.

"We wanted to transcend the boundaries of gender and species to remind us that we as humans are limited only by our imaginations," Bramante noted. "Doing that becomes a metaphor for individuality and spirituality -- for finding that place inside ourselves that is special and that we can transform."

Inspired by the autobiography of French tightrope walker Philippe Petit, Groundwerx members have woven the figure of a tightrope walker throughout The Oddity and the Ecstasy. He first appears as Bramante mimes him behind a scrim in the opening image; later as Nicoli mimes him, walking a line on the floor; then in a sequence where each of the dancers walks the line in his or her own chosen way (slithering, hopping, whirling, hands and feet across the floor like a four-footed animal); and finally as a three-foot-high puppet behind the scrim and then on the moon as it rises.

"Life on the wire is a great metaphor for time, journey, passage -- at any moment, you're gone," reflected Bramante. "We use the tightrope walker as the device to bring the magical into the physical. Everything that happens in the piece could be seen as his recollections or memories."

Certainly The Oddity and the Ecstasy will stir everyone's memories of circuses -- of those transforming moments when an impossible feat was accomplished, a simple trick spun into amazing complexity or a clown's pratfalls evoked unexpected and uncontrollable belly laughs. Keep an eye out for popcorn and cotton candy vendors just outside RISD's doors!

The Oddity and the Ecstasy will be performed on Friday, June 12 and 19 at 8 p.m. and on Saturday, June 13 and 20 at the Rhode Island School of Design Auditorium, South Main Street, Providence. Call 454-4564.