"Late Saturday Afternoon: Portrait": dancers take to the sidewalk in a powerful performance

Dance review |

It's amazing how powerful synchronized movement can be when placed smack in the middle of random sidewalk traffic.

Some passers-by give it an extraordinarily wide berth, stepping out into the street to avoid it. Others just ignore it as they amble by. Baffled parents sidestep their kids' questions about what's going on here. Baseball-capped jocks yell indecipherably at the top of their lungs — to insult the dancers? Or to cheer them on?

A few tourists stop everything they're doing and start snapping away with their cameras. Others just stare, held captive by the hypnotic moves.

"Late Saturday Afternoon: Portrait" is an expansion of dancer-choreographer Maki Morinoue's "Early Sunday Morning" (seen in On the Boards' NW New Works Festival in May). And it's a quiet stunner. Three dancers in black leotards and translucent crinoline skirts — blue, rust, mauve — align themselves at 7-foot intervals up the center of a Pioneer Square sidewalk. At either end, a dancer in plain black stands sentinel, sometimes participating in the choral movement, sometimes not.

Small loudspeakers are attached to each dancer, broadcasting a score created by Morinoue. Castanet rattles, music-box chimes, sharp metallic sounds and children's laughter (eerily echoed) compete with ambient street noise. Responding to some cryptic inward signal, the dancers flutter, shimmy, kick or spin from crouching positions. Arms blade the air in unison. At one point, a handclap is "passed down" the line. At another, the dancers stand stock still, staring at but not reacting to the crowd.

Morinoue and her dancers go through this sequence three times and keep in enigmatic "character" throughout, showing remarkable discipline by not cracking up at some of the comments on the work.

"I don't know," one woman snapped at her inquiring companions. "They're just standing. I have no idea." Another tourist was too busy complaining about the Pioneer Square Underground Tour to pay any heed to this sidewalk-dance business: "They didn't even check our wristbands — we could've just went in!"

Still others tried to join the dance.

In a brief chat afterward, Morinoue said her aim was to explore "how bodies and facings affect space."

Her experiment, which she'll repeat Saturday, was both striking and pleasurable.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com