Every Gesture is a Word: The Comforts and Confines of Community in the choreography of EmmaGrace Skove-Epes

This review originally appeared in 2014. (Since then, the online archive has dissolved but I am glad to be able to share the piece with you here.)

By Lilly Bechtel

Every word is a gesture, every gesture a word. But what if we have something to say, some movement we feel drawn to make, which is outside of the vocabulary of the community in which we live? What if we are alone in our expression? Is this a freeing or an isolating place? These are some of the central questions that EmmaGrace Skove Epes explores in her most recent works, “Rounds” and “Bathtime.”

In “Rounds” the foundation of group movement serves as a refrain, a circle of cohesion, repetition and safety, which, like the chorus of a song, gains increasing depth each time we return to it. A single dancer begins to stand out, her movements tender, beautiful and at times ridiculous as she moves away from and returns again to the chorus of the group.

Over the course of this piece, group movement and the circle of safety becomes a place of stability but also of slight violence, a place where someone is known but also contained, at times supported, other times shunned. Is to be surrounded, known by others, a gift or a trap? “Rounds” is a piece which itself moves through rotations of certainty and doubt, inviting the audience to empathize with the grounding circles we make around ourselves, as well as the painful risks we face in breaking out of them.

In “Bathtime” the potential of community to both support and smother us is examined through water, which covers the stage. A single dancer risks a careful exploration of moving into the water, which takes on the tone of a religious ritual, as the other dancers watch her. The water sets up a contrast between separation and immersion, those who are in the water and those who are out, as the structure of this piece invites us to examine how we respond when we see others moving from one place to another, and the threshold this presents in ourselves. What the water means to each of us is varied (does it cleanse you or drown you?), but everyone on stage and in the audience is asked to feel something about the water at the end of “Bathtime.” To ask themselves, on some level, if they want to stay out or get in.

To watch Emma Grace’s choreography is to consider communication as a means of life, meaning, the way we hold ourselves together. But it is also to see that to hold ourselves together, we must sometimes move away from meaning we have been taught in order to bring to light our own. Part of living is to risk ourselves, partake in a trial and error dance that acts and then reflects; every new step potentially a new hurt but also, potentially, a new, and needed, word.