I liked all the pieces that made up Feedforward. Eve Beglarian’s trombone score, a great mix of high school fanfare, cow noise, and ominous color; Karinne Keithley’s funny text; Kara Feely’s costumes, track suits dotted with sketches of glitter; the overall visual design, credited to a slew of people. I liked Neumann’s choreography–the slower bits more than the sport collisions, actually, the aestheticized tennis strokes, the ballet arms that flick or pop to something different, the deliberate strokes.
And I especially enjoyed the performers: Nead Medlyn and Matt Citron’s perfect comic timing, Andrew Dinwiddie’s solemnly hip-wiggling referee. Among some more conventionally beautiful movers, Taryn Griggs stood out. The beauties (long-limbed, athletic types) sometimes go right through their well-extended lines, but Griggs fills hers out. She has that quality which is often called intention: she appears to have generated the movement herself, to be making the decisions just as we watch her. I hear that Griggs is moving to town this summer–lucky us.
So I liked it all, and I mostly enjoyed myself. All the same, I didn’t find a coherent whole here, or anything particularly inventive on the large scale. A lot of desires and ideas appear to have gone into this, with the unfortunate result that the various desires and ideas overlap and erase each other. For example, I wanted to concentrate on the dancing but the voice-over had me more on the lookout for the next joke. I can imagine plenty of good things emerging from this, as the various collaborators either go their separate ways or pare down their joint art, and I had a perfectly enjoyable evening watching Feedforward, but I didn’t feel that chill of encounter, of change.