by Victoria Sterling
Photos by Jan Tosh Gerling
The apocalypse is not what you expected.
Cue the lights. Close your eyes, and let the world break apart. The elegant production of SUPERCELL reels you into a post-world dystopia of slowdanger’s creation.
A storm destroyed everything. Society’s downfall is met with a chaotic fight for human survival, and SUPERCELL offers a disjointed look into the tenderness and harrow that comes along for the journey. Five bodies appear on stage, strapped with head cameras, which closely live-stream their faces onto a delicate sheet of silk hung high above half the stage. Amidst the apocalypse, we are still online. A spiral lights up the second half of the stage, signifying the storm, as the dancers orient around it in time and space.
This is no simple performance at the Kelly Strayhorn Theatre, which accumulated 400 attendees over its Pittsburgh debut December 9-10, 2023. The performance traveled northeast to New York City this January, selling out both nights at the Flea Theater. Next, SUPERCELL takes Seattle’s Velocity Theatre by storm March 22-23. With support of grant funding and a growing team, the success of SUPERCELL marks a timely milestone for slowdanger as their performance entity recently celebrated its 10-year anniversary. It also marks a hope to continue directing with more resources for research and development.
Within the piece, the timeline of events is fractured as slowdanger expertly toggles between an eerie serenity and cataclysm of the storm. It begins in the middle, with dancers’ bodies roped to the utilitarian jugs of water they desperately extracted and obtained. The droning music fades in and out, as elements of spoken word, singing, and motion incorporate stillness, discordant overlapping, or synchronization. There is no living, thriving, tending, or growing.
We follow the bodies of Anna Thompson and Taylor Knight, co-artistic directors of slowdanger, and Nile Harris, kira shiina, and AJ Libert. The dancing of Taylor, kira, and AJ anchor the movement on stage while Nile’s narration and Anna’s singing and poetry break the fourth wall in SUPERCELL.The theater is activated as Nile’s face is projected, distorted and glitching, on the silk screen, as his lurid words ring in direct communication to the other performers, the audience, and with himself. Live-streaming with philosophy and emotion, the storm brings out the commentary of a generation.
Each night, his words are partly improvised. Phrases like “Venmo me 40 acres and a mule” and “Katrina, Katrina, Katrina” (referencing ‘Here comes the hurricane, bitch’) stitch in cultural references to the outside reality of social media sensationalism, collective trauma, mutual aid, and structures of oppression. Anna’s words echo, “I can change but I won’t.” The gripping narration draws out a layer to the downfall of it all, which begins with society’s own faults outside of any storm.
Meditating climate disaster began on a porch in Texas. Anna and Taylor witnessed a supercell storm together, the severe type thunderstorm, during a visit to Taylor’s parent’s home. Taylor described in a Q&A feeling a “hypnotic pull to this really beautiful nature event but at the same time, this realization there’s a lot of destruction and pain.” Anna and Taylor started ideating SUPERCELL, which is the second and final installment of a trilogy.
The first, VLX, appeared in 2018, and the third Empathy Machine appeared in 2019. Empathy Machine demonstrated a cyborgian or post-human world where people had to lose their ‘human-ness’ to survive. Taylor describes, “there is a level of human-ness that is curious to ask questions, to be challenged, to challenge one another, to fail, to celebrate, to live, to die, to cry, and all those things. In creating this work, we use the body as a way to be that shuttle.” What might lead to this loss of empathy in humanity?
Anna answers, “with the current world, we felt ‘apocalyptic climate event’ made the most sense,” leading to the three-year development of SUPERCELL.
Meanwhile, genuine tenderness on stage offers glimmers of calm during calamity – hope, even. The audience can watch the whole of the story progress in all its eerie elegance or follow any one of the dancers as they express individual storylines. In awe, I watched their bodies communicate, touch, struggle together, hold one another, fight, and, of course, dance in the midst of storm and demise. “Sirens go off in the distance,” Anna sings as the droning sounds move closer. When the alarms inevitably start ringing, the dancing explodes with swift synchronized choreography as one collective body. A disturbing urgency also rings through their rapid movements. “Do you believe we’re doing enough? Do you trust you’ll keep your sanity?” I write in my notebook during the performance.
In line with slowdanger’s experimental approach, each detail offers homage to the tactical and multi-layered elements their piece represents. Advanced techniques are augmented with postmodern and contemporary dance to bring each dancer’s characterization alive, often by integrating the still, slow, and subtle.
“My roses died,” says Anna onstage. In the opening monologue with Nile, the sound production includes Taylor’s iphone recording of their mother’s wind chime collection during the storm they witnessed. Each dancer is clad in strips of apparel sewn from reused slowdanger costumes of years past. The costumes often rip apart during practice and are constantly mended and reborn with every use. It isn’t just symbolic that the video camera headgear is glitching – the live projections display how difficult and rowdy the clunky technology is to dance with. Even the exploration of a concept – such as dystopia, or performance itself – is first broken into the purest forms before being reconfigured onstage.
In its aftermath, the dancers are crouched to the ground in strife, as the performance continues to its gloomy, yet peaceful, final chapter. What remains in a post-world tethered to faulting technology and the reductive burdens of resource extraction? For one, stories of the raw elements of survival, connection, and human emotion. As humanity is already falling to climate change, any softness to life is endangered. slowdanger spotlights how intimately human it all feels at the end of the world.
Victoria Sterling (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist and writer living in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Previously the manager of the Geography of Philosophy Project at the University of Pittsburgh, Victoria is curating events and projects in the city’s local art and cultural scene.
slowdanger will be holding a Winter Intensive talk on 2/29 with Shiftworks Community Public Art at 4PM-5:30PM. They will also be performing in a Uhaul Disco show at Certain Death II on 3/8.
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