Ripe Time
New York City
“Rachel Dickstein
Dancing the Unseen”
American Theatre Magazine
March 2009
BY AARON MACK SCHLOFF
Rewriting text is easy, but how do you rewrite movement?
In a Brooklyn rehearsal for Fire Throws, a varation on Sophocles that utilizes Balinese dance, Antigone 1 (Laura Butler) moves toward the spot where her dead brother lies unburied. Should the Chorus hold her, undulate and release her, the director Rachel Dickstein wonders—or do they expel her? Might Antigone 1 simply pass through the cluster of Chorus members—or possibly over them? Does the Chorus stand still? Or does it rotate to block Antigone 1’s way? Each choice reads differently, since each movement redefines Antigone 1’s action at this crucial moment—an action described by the Sentry but never seen in the classic play that is Fire Throw’s source.
This revision in rehearsal, happening after two workshops and still not locked down, constitutes the key element of Rachel Dickstein’s work method. An imagist, she moves fluidly between text and dance, always attending to a narrative line. The result is a unique style critics have noted in the work her company, Ripe Time, has done since its formation in 2000.
“Some directors who do stunning things have an overlay—the images don’t explore the text,” says Morgan Jenness, a Ripe Time fan from the first, who signed on as the Fire Throws dramaturg and recently became Dickstein’s agent. Ripe Time’s scripts, images and gestures relate to each other like the parts of a sentence, Jenness continues, adding, “The movement is the verb, the image is the adjective, and the text is the noun.” This integration, combined with the lyricism of Dickstein’s style, reminds Jenness of the works of one of Dickstein’s mentors, the celebrated director/choreographer Martha Clarke.
Fire Throws, performing this month at 3LD Art & Technology Center in Lower Manhattan, may be Dickstein’s strongest fusion yet, and a telling exploration of the question that has animated all her work: What is a woman’s power in the world?