Dance Review: ‘Tooth and Claw’ by GRIDLOCK Dance at the Cultural Arts Center of Montgomery College
by Justin Rustle
Full cast of “Tooth and Claw.” Photo by Bill Gorman.
You can’t watch the dancing people in front of your own eyes if you are looking at TikTok.
Although choreographer and Artistic Director of GRIDLOCK Dance, Madeline Maxine Roman, made a point of saying abstract art is open to interpretation, that was at least part of the message behind “Tooth and Claw” presented by GRIDLOCK Dance at the Cultural Arts Center of Montgomery College Studio Theater. Featuring dancers Destiny Arlette, Levi Coy, Khiana Gilmer, Dylan Lambert, Julianna Raimondo, and Baylee Wong as well as students from C-Unit Dance Studio, “Tooth and Claw” is an expansion of a 2023 work originally created as part of the Atlas Arts Lab Fellowship.
…conceptually rich and ambitious in the breath of ideas in which it grounded itself.
The piece began with a single dancer in an olive-drab, boilersuit, fluidly thrashing to a Paganini violin solo. As the blistering arpeggios came to a close, another 12 dancers emerged from the upstage entrance to subsume her into the mass. One of several, well-executed, large group visual effects throughout the performance, this engulfing tree of hands was also a nice use of a performance space without much in the way of wings.
With hard angular shadows on their faces and under dim but austere lights, the dancers in their identical boilersuits had a distinctly dystopian, industrial appearance. Then, as the dancers arrived in a line upstage, TikTok videos from get-rich-quick influencers began to play on the back wall. For several minutes the dancers shuffled and stomped through a repetitive seated phrase, struggling to be audible over the video soundtrack. From the audience your focus was pulled in two directions. The video was projected quite high on the back wall, making it impossible to see both the performers and the footage. As the performers labored to produce an object of choreography in a disrupted attention economy, those of us sitting in the audience had to make a real-time choice about where to pay attention. For me it was the most effective moment of the evening.
A subsequent section—one we could perhaps call the trashy, fast fashion quick change—hit a similarly economic note. A single dancer standing on top of the little pyramid struggled to remove layers of clothes comically worn over her boilersuit, and place them in a trash bag dropped down from above. A distorted version of Madonna’s “Material Girl” played in the background.
It closed with two solos that joined to become a pas de deux. Performing to the sounds of ocean waves, the dancers seemed to be offering an alternative to the digital anxiety of a society united by isolation. This final section of the work also included poetry written by Roman’s wife, Valentina Roman, referencing the Maryland expression of the “crab basket effect.” To paraphrase: ‘If you keep crabs in a basket you don’t need a lid because if one crab tries to escape the others will pull it back in. But baskets don’t grow on the ocean floor.’
Overall, “Tooth and Claw” was conceptually rich and ambitious in the breath of ideas in which it grounded itself. The speed with which it moved through those ideas was occasionally disorienting, but that overstimulating pace felt calculated to mirror the disjunctive tempo of contemporary media.
Running Time: Fifty minutes with no intermission.
“Tooth and Claw” ran September 27-29, 2024 presented by GRIDLOCK Dance at the Cultural Arts Center of Montgomery College, 7995 Georgia Ave, Silver Spring, MD 20910. For more information about GRIDLOCK Dance, click here.
