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Leaving Home

Leaving Home
11/28/06

To me, this dance speaks of transitions, moving from one place/stage in life to another.  It resonates, for me, of birth.  This is revealed in the overall arc of moving from inside the ring to outside of it.  It is revealed in the theme of shifting from attending to acting to intending to integrating, the developmental sequence.  It is clear in the blind groping of the opening in which the dancers test their bodies, catalogue their parts, like babies, in order to determine the function of those parts.  I see it in the sensuality/sexuality of touching: the aimless probing of childhood.  I see this in the way the dancers transition, finally, to standing.

The dance also resonates for me with leaving home for the first time.  Some leave home alone, others do it together.  In the first part, Alex seeks a partner with whom to make the next transition.  April rejects; Jenn accepts.
There is the seeking of new relationships to replace the familial ones.
There is the tension of acceptance/rejection.  There is the learning of new skills, opening checking accounts and opening eyes.  There is the change of physical place, exchanging one site for another.  It is also archetypal, like birth, a movement from childhood to adulthood.  The ring becomes smaller by the end, so small that the dancers are finally squeezed out.

It also resonates with my recent experience of graduating from school.  I had built a sort of home for myself over the course of three years through the University of Maryland and the Laban/Bartenieff Institute of Movement Studies.  The final success of these ventures was not reassuring.  I felt, instead, cut off.  This Fall has been a personal transition from one way of life to another.  The change has been exhausting.  I find myself having to reconstruct my identity and I often feel lost.  I feel shunned by the academic dance world, by all of the departments that passed me over.  I am less sure now why I had wanted that so badly, except that it would have saved me from having to make this particular journey.  I had been on a path of avoidance.

Malcolm Shute 

9/10/07

Shute received the 2007 Excellence in Sound Design/Original Composition Metro DC Dance award, and was a finalist for the Emerging Choreographer award, for his work on "Leaving Home."

See a clip of this piece on youtube.

Photos by Jennifer Mueller