"Woolgatherer": Dance with a healthy dose of fiber art

Dance Review |

There's something lively, hallucinatory and — yes — woolly afoot in "Woolgatherer," the new multimedia show by Manifold Motion. The action may be confined to a very small stage, but it traffics in big ideas and uses a variety of means to address them, including dance, aerial work, video wizardry, a feisty/hypnotic electronic score and, as its title may suggest, some colorful, limb-ensnarling fiber art.

Opening on a stage strewn with electrical cords and backed by a video screen, the show follows a classic dream-vision arc. Three dancers (Bridget Gunning, Nicole Sasala and MM founding artistic director Keely Isaak Meehan) stumble and teeter as they're jostled by forces that can't be seen.

Those forces can certainly be heard, however, in the form of a synthesizer score that keeps adding busy parts to itself, with each blip of sound creating an ever-bigger visual "seismographic reading" on the sceen. Eventually, sensory overload sends Meehan and Sasala slithering offstage, while Gunning — her psyche apparently short-circuiting — winds up pulling this electro-nightmare down around her, screen and all.

While she's recovering, we're ushered into an alternative reality festooned with fibers and backdropped by jungle flora in everchanging silhouette. Soon two oddly garbed dancers (Meehan and Sasala in new guises) enter this seeming Arcadia and stage a sort of tribal showdown, before enticing Gunning into their world.

The choreography has its moments. But it's the imaginative staging — and Sara McChristian's sumptuous lighting — that marks Manifold Motion as a troupe of great promise. Most striking is a moment when Meehan retreats to a hollow, floor-to-ceiling "fiber column," brilliantly lit inside, and lures Gunning into it. The two tussle — is this seduction or soul-stealing? — until Gunning is jettisoned out of it. She immediately wants back in. But she may not know what she's up against.

The suggestion seems to be that the strands of our dreams can entangle us as confusingly as the electronic strands of the information-overkill reality we inhabit.

Randy Jones, Mike McCracken and Leo Mayberry deserve special praise for their sound/video concoctions. So do fiber artists Chaya Branley and Brenna Flood who handily erase the line between costuming and stage design.

The dancing — especially the aerial work — needs some fine-tuning. But "Woolgatherer" indicates that Manifold Motion is an outfit well worth keeping an eye on.

Note: When going to Youngstown Cultural Arts Center, look for Frank B. Cooper School. It may not be a school anymore, but that's the biggest sign on the place.

Michael Upchurch: mupchurch@seattletimes.com