Photo by Pat PaduaKelly Bond and Melissa Krodman are already performing when audience members are ushered into the exposed-brick performance space at Caos on F, and they are still performing when Capital Fringe staff thanks the audience for coming and shows us the way out. The 50-minute dance can be seen as a slice of an ongoing performance art piece—in this case, an avant-garde cabaret-cum-20 Minute Workout.
If this is performance art as the anxiety of modern life, it begins as a seemingly industrial one. The pair dance briskly in pace to a relentless electronic loop whose monotonous rhythms suggests a dark modern update of Raymond Scott’s “Powerhouse”. But just when you think it’s all repetition, it breaks down. Limbs rise and fall gradually, the dancers, who mirror each other’s moves from start to finish, circle around each other in an ever wider orbit. As the dancers work the room an element of suspicion creeps into their choreography, in a space small enough to allow the use of not just their limbs but also their eyes, which dart back and forth among audience members, eager to connect but also wary.
Bond and Krodman are highly disciplined performers, athletes with finely tuned senses of drama and play. Colony is an abstract piece ripe for interpretation and projection. However ambiguous and enigmatic it may appear, it’s built around a fascinating dramatic arc and structure, and a score that brilliantly weaves in and out of pummeling rhythms to abstract electronics, from pop-song fragments to simply the sound of the breath. The tension between emotional distance and intimacy is bridged in a sequence I won’t reveal, but let’s say it’s as simple as it is disarming, convincing yet at a safe remove.
Remaining performances:
Sunday, July 15 at 4 p.m.
Wednesday, July 18 at 8:30 p.m.
Saturday, July 21 at 2 p.m.
Saturday, July 28 at 7:15 p.m.
At Caos on F, 923 F Street NW, second floor.
