A brief essay on Lionel Popkin’s choreography

by George Lugg, Associate Director, REDCAT

Dances by Lionel Popkin are meticulously detailed works of choreography that flow with surprising ease and are marked by intimacy and openness. Popkin narrows the distance between dancer and viewer, not through formal means, but through a directness and immediacy that assert the human scale of dance.

Popkin is a nimble, quick-witted dancer and a thoughtful, deliberate choreographer. Throughout his creative life—he has been actively making dances for more than eighteen years—he has performed in the works of a number of distinctive choreographers, including Stephanie Skura, Terry Creach, and, most notably, Trisha Brown. But his own body of choreographed works owes more to his lifelong interest in improvisational dance forms.

In the midst of tightly choreographed material, Popkin and his dancers retain an inquisitive nature and open gazes that amplify the unassuming virtuosity of their dancing. He exquisitely pairs abstract movement with fine-tuned gestures, creating dances legible to an untrained eye while surprising trained viewers with his unconventional and acutely distilled simplicity. One feels the conversational possibilities of dance in the back-and-forth of his phrasings and in his welcome presumption that audiences are listening.

Watch one of Popkin’s duets, and you will see what I mean: his duets are dialogues. Like improvised movement, the physical and psychological exchanges he navigates flicker with immediacy and honesty. His dancers converse with each other in a thread of ideas expressed in movement. At any moment, one feels, the conversation could easily spill into words.

The surprising source of this quality is the muteness of movement itself. Popkin bypasses the side effects of translation by building his dances from the exquisite literalness of human action. In the way that physically holding someone up defines being “upheld,” he seeks out elemental physical metaphors that serve to ground the meanings of his dances in movement itself. In Your Hand/My Mouth (2008), for example, two dancers share an extended duet, intermittently bound by an awkward physical connection (to which the title is a not-so-subtle clue). The movement material undermines the dancers’ abilities, and the resulting imagery is by turns infantile, maternal, erotic, and simply absurd. Through an essentially physical exploration, Popkin is able to enact the uncomfortable moments of choice that ultimately define us as we attempt to negotiate the limits that our interpersonal ties place on our individual freedoms.

Through his choreographic eloquence and nuanced direction, Popkin is able to bring such directness to bear on all aspects of the dance. Instead of layering thematic ideas upon his work, his concise crafting allows multiple readings to emerge from within. There Is An Elephant In This Dance employs the presence of a man-size plush elephant head to evoke references to both the obvious and the unspoken—from religious iconography to personal cultural heritage to the arrival of parenthood. Popkin startles the viewer by subtly animating the object while simultaneously using it to reconfigure his dancing body. With sly humor and vivid imagery, he exploits the viewer’s growing attachment to a constructed “body” to slowly unearth the complexities and multiplicities that are housed within our skins. In There Is An Elephant In This Dance, the slippery qualities of abstract movement become a suitable map to the kind of interior spaces where people stop performing and start communicating.