That’s Carrie Hanson, founding artistic director of Chicago-based dance company The Seldoms, and she’s talking about Lyndon Baines Johnson, our 36th president (counting Grover Cleveland twice, because he had two non-consecutive terms).
A stranger subject for a modern dance production I’m not sure I’ve found, but with the wild success of Hamilton — the musical based on the life of another powerful American political figure — perhaps such artistic-political narratives are rightly becoming their own genre.
On Friday and Saturday (inauguration weekend), The Seldoms will be performing Power Goes at the Aronoff Center for the Arts’ Jarson-Kaplan Theater. Hanson’s interpretation of the way Johnson exhibited power — physical and mental — will be portrayed through dance moves both “pedestrian” and expressionistic. (Johnson has already been the subject of Broadway play All the Way, starring Bryan Cranston.)
The performance is being sponsored by Contemporary Dance Theater, which describes Power Goes as “a dance theater work combining physical action and contemporary dance, spoken word, sound design including recorded voice and historical recordings, visual design including text/video/photo, and installation incorporating both literal (object) and abstract (painterly) gestures.”
It officially premiered at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art in 2015, after a “soft” debut at Southern Illinois University’s 2014 XFEST.
Hanson’s enthusiasm for her historical muse began with the four books in biographer Robert A. Caro’s The Years of Lyndon Johnson series.
“Everyone remembers Kennedy and nobody knows much about Johnson,” she says. “But he was really this complex, charismatic figure. He brought us a lot of social safety nets, but he also brought us Vietnam, so his legacy is mixed.”
Besides his political successes and difficulties, it’s his presence that most interests Hanson. “He was a big man — he had big hands, big features and he really used that intimidating stature. He was communicating through his body as well as communicating through language, so it felt like a rich opportunity to mine physical states of being and postures and gestures.”
The movement and script seem to weave through a kind of dance, balancing one against the other and allowing the audience to determine which one matters more.
“It’s really dance theater,” Hanson says. “Power Goes does have a few scenes that are scripted, but what we’ve really done with a lot of the language is to break it apart and disrupt it with both other kinds of vocalizations and, certainly, movement. That movement can range from material people would recognize as dance to more pedestrian movement (and) to staged action.”
Power Goes has been The Seldoms’ most toured production.
When the dancers hit the road for a new city, they bring with them their “formidable” but still minimal set. As a backdrop, 75 white wooden chairs are used, but what that might mean is left to the viewer.
“There’s a section where we refer to the sit-ins, when we’re addressing the civil rights movement during the 60s,” Hanson says.
This part of the dance will actually involve local dancers, a team The Seldoms will meet just a few days before the performance.
“I felt that if I was going to try and stage the power of those protests, I needed more than six bodies,” she says. Of course, the set’s chairs could also imply “seats,” the word we use to talk about who is installed in a position with the power for direct change.
“Johnson is painted (in his biographies) as someone who really made things happen,” Hanson says. “We’re living in this moment where it feels like nothing in Washington is happening, and (there is) the sheer kind of impasse created by this deep ideological divide.”
Johnson certainly used his “seat of power” when he occupied it. Now, he posthumously has a “dance of power.”
The Seldoms will perform POWER GOES Friday and Saturday at the Aronoff Center for the Arts’ Jarson-Kaplan Theater. Tickets and more info: cincinnatiarts.org.
