ON STAGE: The Tic Toc Don’t Stop
AN INDEFINITE DURATION
When: 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday
Where: NAMBA Performing Arts Space, 47 S Oak St, Ventura
Cost: $20
Information:www.devinfulton.brownpapertickets.com
Time never moves the way we want it to-it’s either going way too fast or crawling along. For choreographer and dancer Devin Fulton it seemed to stop all together when her second child was born and due to complications mother and child had to spend time in the hosptial neonatal intensive care unit. Fulton refused to leave her newborn’s side..
“I experienced full on psychosis because I couldn’t sleep,” she says. “I remember wanting to take the clock off the wall and just throw it because it seems so so slow.”
Out of that came “An Indefinite Duration,” a seven-minute piece she premiered last year in her still-untitled dance company. That now forms the thematic backbone to an evening of works by Fulton and other choreographers around the concept of time, tonight and tomorrow night at NAMBA Performing Arts Space in Ventura. (And, yes, her child is perfectly fine now, thanks.)
If Fulton’s name is familiar it might be from her stint with the Pin-Down Girls, the burlesque troupe she led around a decade ago. Plus her sultry choreography has been seen in music videos for Colbie Caillet and Brooke Frazier.
This current incarnation of her work is more local, more working-mom. It blends community dancers with pros, bringing together her best dance students with longtime friends from Los Angeles. And she’s delighted to see how many want to make the trip up for rehearsals.
“An Indefinite Duration” features her dancers in front of six clocks that they obsess over, along with props like cards, beach balls, beach towels, all wild and bright colors. The clocks will then remain for the other works on the program.
Her fellow choreographers are Gianna Burright, Brittney Nevison, Estéfano Suazo, and Anthony Arellano. And the dancers also include Sacheen Nehring Swan, Keelan Dann, Olivia Valdellon, Bryn Gallagher, and Chereese Mackey.
Fulton’s opening number is called “The Conference,” which is a call to arms, a fourth-wall breaking dance with “that kind of ‘we are here and ready to roar’ kind of thing,” she says.
Burright has made two pieces for the show. One is an examination of love lost, based on a long distance romance that went bad, and features six dancers in a “beautifully crafted and heartfelt” work set to a Florence + The Machine track. That is followed by Burright’s solo piece.
The first half ends with a duet between Nevison and Fulton, which came out of the aftermath of the Thomas Fire. (Fulton and family had to flee out of state because of the air quality.)
The second half drops the contemporary dance vibe and gets a bit more sensual, Fulton’s Fosse-inspired work. Suazo and Arellano have teamed up for a work using a song by the band Two Foot, telling a tale about two street performers who balance the thrill of creative art and their desperate situation.
Fulton has made sure the evening works as a whole, and fortunately she surrounded herself with the right people to do so.
“Almost everyone in this cast is also a choreographer,” Fulton says. “That’s the first time for me. But that worked for my process. We did not have a lot of time to rehearse all together, so I could tell somebody to go work on a trio while I worked on a trio. There was a lot of multitasking going on.”
