Lace
Four dancers performing multifarious aspects associated with “lace”. Though the performance includes neo classical elements, we may expect a colourful collage of different dance styles and theatrical inputs which mark Eugene Rhodes’ III boundless and imaginative choreographies. The performance is not telling a story, though it includes fractions of stories and ideas and leaves ample room for personal interpretation of the viewer.
The dancers are accompanied by a live string quartet playing classical music, and each dancer is dancing to and led by their own instrument. There are solo performances, which are guided by their personal instruments into duos, and finally the full harmony of the intricate quartet.
“Lace” can mean intricate patterns of precious material, with hours of painstakingly accurate and artful stitching. In olden times, women would spend hours by the window or bent over in the meagre light of scarce candles. It was a social or a lonely occasion. Poor and rich women would indulge producing their own precious patterns.
“Lace” has been produced under the most various circumstances, all over the world. Like expensive hand-woven Persian carpets, lace often was considered valuable, and in some parts of the world that white precious equivalent of money was an important part of a dowry. It would prove that the women to be wed would be patient, persistent, humble, gifted, and – last but not least, rich, as she would be able to invest so many hours lace-making, and not doing household chores.
“Lace” has been used for veils, in wedding dresses, traditional garb, and almost exclusively on special occasions. It is thus comparable to a peacock’s feathers, a showing-off of erotic potential, of status, of identity and background.
“Lace” can be associated with meditation, secrets, the passing on of traditions. From hidden farms in the Swiss valley of the Emmental, from Appenzell and St.Gallen to the voodoo traditions of Creole women in Louisiana, lace is found everywhere, lingering about innocently, gathering dust on old chests and drawers, yet creeping up on us silently, like women’s own global DNA. Who knows what hidden messages are to be found in lace patterns? The female equivalent to the Da Vinci Code?
Yes, one might think those humble lace-making women have had but pure thoughts and possessed virginal hearts, but we can be sure that in many alace-producing woman lingered thoughts of revenge, of shattering their social prisons, as the movie “Arsenic and Old Lace” lets us imagine.
- by Walther Zimmerli, Bern