Review: A Prayer for Peace by Blue Lapis Light, Austin, to September 29, 2024
by David Glen Robinson

 

Blue Lapis Light, the company headed by longtime Austin choreographer and performance artist Sally Jacques, is presenting A Prayer for Peace. Its newest production takes place outside on a tall office building in west Austin. Literally on the face of a tall office building. Yes, this is the company that performs in harnesses at great heights. In recent years, they have added show pieces in silks, the gymnastic mode with performers holding and climbing long twin silk fabric strips—often  elevated to giddying heights above the crowd.

 

A Prayer for Peace featured harness pieces taking advantage of gravity and elevation to produce strong impressions of human beings flying. Uniform ensemble pieces were well rehearsed and skillfully performed. These set the stage for solos and duets that varied the show's sensory texture. Grounded dance in front of the building gave us powerful, expressive art, and silks pieces were highly accented. A question for arts editors and critics regarding mixed arts performances like A Prayer for Peace: is this dance or something else?

 

A Prayer for Peace certainly escapes the cage of genre and should be taken exactly at its title, as expressed by its dancers, performance artists, gymnasts, lighting designers, musicians, and technicians. A confident and reverential atmosphere prevailed throughout the evening. The audience was uplifted and felt no anxiety for the performers.

 

The riggers, important figures in any harness show, deserved great credit. The designer and lead rigger Barry Wilson was assisted by James Faerber, Mike Klein, and Adam Mitchell. Brett Hornsby of Cicada Lighting and Steven Williams designed the lighting. Sound Designer William Meadows, of long tenure with Blue Lapis Light, was up to his usual exceptional work. The musicians were Roberto Paolo Riggio, musical director and violinist; Jason McKenzie, percussionist; and Nagavalli, vocalist.

 

The well selected cast of skilled professional dancers were Kari Burke, Richard Dashner, Jack Anthony Dunlap II, Katie Gunderson, Lisa Anne Kobdish, Clay Moore, Amy Myers, Ivry Newsome, Christine Perez, Jun Shen (Sunny), and Nicole Whiteside.

 

Amy Myers showed her perfect mastery of harness work and the silks in three major sections of the presentation.

 

 

Her first standout solo was a rope/harness piece in which she descended slowly to the entrance platform of the building. She made starlike pinwheeling motions, slowly, slowly, with additional crescent-shaped and circular motions. Despite the celestial imagery, the impression of the solo was one of descent into the abyss, like a slow poetic drowning in immense depths.

 

Later, at the same position on the building, she performed a similar dance on air on the silks without the security of a harness. That undertaking always lends drama to elevated performances on those thin paired fabrics. Myers performed with her trademark serenity and smoothness.

 

Another exceptional performance emerged in her duet with Clay Moore in harness on the corner of the building. Tight unison shapes and movements were made more challenging because they were moving in the same lane while roped and fastened separately. Nary a tangle slowed them down. The choreography was complex and attentive to the least movement and position of performer and cables. Gravity was the assistant choreographer, one whose insistent demands came first. Myers and Moore made the complexities look easy, incorporating much of the swinging back-and-forth harness choreography for which Blue Lapis Light has become famous.

 

Associate Artistic Director Nicole Whiteside, for years responsible for many of the choreographic concepts of Blue Lapis Light, excelled at all points in the program. Her spectacular moment was the silks duet in the second half of the show when she, in the higher position, held the fabrics firmly while movements went on below. The easy strength Whiteside showed while holding the silks unsecured by a harness became a truly awe-inspiring moment. Her assurance and the skill and efforts of the entire ensemble inspired the confidence of the entire audience,and opened the door to the prayerful contemplation offered so generously.

 

 

“Sunny” Jun Shen stood well grounded on the entrance porch roof. His dance began sedately. He reached to the audience, upward to the stars, and beyond. His dance was a prayer in movement, conveying the reverence, supplication, and contemplation of all spiritual questioning. He brought the audience to the full meaning of the performance and to the recognition, shared by all world religions, of the meeting of God without and God within.

 

The wind blew the silks into glyphic shapes of air and fabric through it all, handwriting from above written on the wall of wind. Colored smoke wafted from dispensers, brushing colors beguilingly, an element of mystery that obscured as often as it brightened. The harvest supermoon, one night past full, commanded the audience with its gold-becoming-silver light, upstaging the production with magnificence.

 

 

A Prayer for Peace, in harmony with nature, was devoted to gratitude. The audience’s growing sense of participation in the night, the show, the moon, the wind, and the stars became the articulation of that prayer. It wafted upward to the high ragged clouds blowing away, giving the sense of the earth turning and billowing toward those lands without such peace. The special evening granted, impossibly but truly, scattered seeds of blessing that may flower someday.

 

A Prayer for Peace runs until September 29, 2024, at 5508 Parkcrest Drive, west Austin.

 

 

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A Prayer for Peace
by Blue Lapis Light
Blue Lapis Light

September 18 - 22, 26 - 19, 2024

5508 Parkcrest Dr, Austin, TX 78731

Tickets $25 - $65 via Blue Lapis Light (click HERE)