Pill Popping Blues
Emiko Manners and Kendall Carpenter
Pill Popping Blues explores a wide range of maladies and afflictions and how these can be expressed, understood, and remedied through movement. These maladies are not meant to create limitations on a dancer’s range of movement, but as sources of inspiration for the creation of new movement, that, although abstract, is meant to evoke and ameliorate the experience of these various physical and psychological conditions as what isolates the afflicted from the social standard. All six dancers portray different characters with distinct personalities, each with his/her own way of moving that emphasizes their own individuality, but who are united by the overall desire to communicate with and console one another. Despite its dismal subject matter, the gracefully awkward duets, solos, and sextets that make up Pill Popping Blues result in a playful tragic/comic outburst of emotion and joie de vivre.
Type: Dance-Theater
Running time: 12 minutes
Date of Creation: May 2006
Direction/choreography: Catherine Galasso
Music: various, mixed by Catherine Galasso
Performances by: Kendall Carpenter, Risa Fujita, Emiko Manners, Jenna Rea, Robert Turner, and Evangeline Wolfe