amyo/tinyrage

Press for “too”

“too still leaves one with the desire to maybe grab the hand of the person waiting patiently next to you in the elsevator, and spin them around–it feels like it might be a better way to say something, sometimes.” TBA Blog,  2009

“I found the performance to be energetic and intriguing. The interplay between live dance and video was thoughtful and by no means a gimmick.” Neighborhood Notes, Portland, OR 2009

TBA Diary: AMYO/tinyrage, Too
2:15 PM September 11th, 2009 by Matthew Korfhage

Amy O’Neal is rightly well known for her kinetic, inventive hip hop dance withlocust (read WW’s review of their TBA performance this week) and with performance artist Reggie Watts, but in her TBA Fest show with Ellie Sandstrom, Too, there are much different things at stake.

The piece begins not with live dance but with film, with a David-Lynch creep up the steps to a house, and what follows is a montage of domestic and urban tableaux filmed in places far flung as Denton (TX), Seattle, and Tokyo—in archaic wallpapered room, at a park, at a wall, on a rain slicked city roof, in front of a loading ramp—in which the spaces’ normal context is first enacted, then transformed  by dance into foreign spaces, as if they were only now being discovered.

Meanwhile O’Neal and Sandstrom are gathering the appropriate costumes and laying them neatly on the stage as the film plays, in preparation for a deeply unexpected turn (one I’m now ruining for you if you haven’t seen this), in which O’Neal and Sandstrom, with bravissimo discipline, create a new dance out of the pieces of all of the other far-flung dances as they flit across the screen in short takes—picking up on pieces in the park, then at the wall, then in a computer lab—convincingly stitching a wide array of movements into a single movement, trying on the costumes of the various dancers as if to make themselves appropriate to each environment, or appropriate to each dancer. Really, they changed clothes almost self-consciously, as if they had arrived at the wrong dinner party. Aside from being technically impressive and downright humorous and a hell of a show, it was also emotionally affecting.

Of course, this flies apart, becomes confused—and this confusion is underlined in a segment that defies all fluidity, in which the same feat is attempted (and fails miserably) with karaoke. On screen “My Humps” blurs into “Beer Belly” into “Total Eclipse of the Heart” into “Sweet Child of Mine,” seamlessly but impossibly: no one could ever sing along. Except that in dance, it can again cohere: when the movers take to dancing to the filmed karaoke, instead of singing, O’Neal picks up even the postures of someone leaning back on a couch, as a spectator—and the gesture is terribly, beautifully intimate.

In the program guide, Too purports to be about the challenges of human to human contact—and this is hammered home in the show’s only major misstep, the heavy-handed set piece in a Japanese love hotel that thuddingly closes the piece, in which the dancers become slappy puppets of sorts, ruined for humanity. But throughout most of the performance what was striking was the absolute fluidity of O’Neal and Sandstrom as they asserted and reasserted each role and reapportioned themselves to each contact. And it was this that also seemed truer to the world that we experience each day, a consistent readjustment to new contexts and codes that don’t require breaking so much as assimilation in grades. And, still, out of this hodgepodged mimicry and mirroring (listen to two old friends laugh when together, or see how they dress, then follow each home to their spouses), there is nonetheless a genuine intimacy. Too, when it maintained its lighthearted ambiguities—which was during most of the piece, even during a chaotically violent push-pull breakdown at the piece’s midpoint—was a testament to a cobbled-together, half-borrowed life that to most of us is achingly familiar.

About Amy performing in Reggie Watt’s show Disinformation at the Under the Radar Festival in 2008:

“an astounding hip-hop dancer, Amy O’Neal, so magnetically creative on her feet that for a few minutes she manages to steal the focus away from Mr. Watts.”- New York Times, 2008

http://www.vimeo.com/2327237

“Amy O’Neal of locust is a highly skilled performer, but as a dancemaker, she combines that virtuosity with some serious eccentricity.”      - Seattle Weekly, 2005

Stranger Genius Awards Short List-2004

Amy O’Neal is not a dancer’s dancer. Sure, she’s danced with the venerable Pat Graney Company and Mary Sheldon Scott/Jarrad Powell Performance and, like many Seattle dancers, she supplements her income with a teaching gig at Velocity, but her reach extends beyond the hermetic dance world. Her primary work is with the high-energy Locust, where she’s half of a choreographer/composer duo (the other half is Zeke Keeble; powerhouse dancer Ellie Sandstrom is a frequent collaborator). Western Bridge director Eric Fredericksen says O’Neal’s choreography “comes out of a rock culture, a new-music culture–you could refer to it as ‘downtown.’” Northwest Film Forum’s Michael Seiwerath, who asked Locust to create a site-specific work at the treacherous, concrete Little Theatre space last November, also cites the strong theater and video aspects of the work, and heaps praise upon O’Neal and Sandstrom’s “fearless dancing.” Locust’s new full-length piece, convenience, will incorporate work from the beloved theater troupe Collaborator, and O’Neal recently assisted as movement director for the fat-suited sexpots of Do Group’s Flo & Glo. If O’Neal can choreograph for ladies in Marshmallow Man-proportioned wire-hoop fat suits, then what can’t she do? ANNIE WAGNER- The Stranger

“O’Neal is a lovely dancer and smart choreographer who has been getting a lot of commissions and general attention lately.”  -Seattle Weekly, 2003

“As always, O’Neal’s choreography embodies tremendous physicality and fierce precision, but also a clear understanding that small, everyday gestures can have the most impact (a curled hand; a pointed finger).”   – The Seattle Times, 2003

“Her work can be visually arresting as well as physically challenging – she can sweep across the stage with equal parts disdain and drive.”         – Seattle Weekly, 2003

“Amy O’Neal dances with singular confidence.”- Dance Magazine, 2003