Sarris' skillfully tied 'Threads'
SPECIAL TO THE NEWS • DAVID SMITH
Terri Sarris presents multi-media dance event 'Loose Threads' at Performance Network through Sunday.
REVIEW
Sarris' skillfully tied 'Threads'
By SUSAN ISAACS NISBETT
NEWS SPECIAL WRITER
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about “Loose Threads,” the show by video maker, dancer and choreographer Terri Sarris continuing at Performance Network this weekend, is its coherence - the sense of beginning, middle and end to its layering of video, live movement, music and text.
The first half uses found footage from home movies Sarris has rescued at rummage sales: of babies learning to swim, people getting married, or opening Christmas gifts. She focuses on anonymous souls - so many loose threads to tie up, so many poignant questions of why and how and who.
Ever so gradually, she turns the camera on herself, asking those same questions through videos she’s made of or about her own family, and asking viewers to tie up the threads left dangling at the end of first part of the show (which concludes with a piece about her father) and the second (which focuses on her mother).
That it’s easy to do this says a lot about admirable architecture, locally and long-term, in Sarris’s work.
Whether she is mining a celluloid treasure trove on sewing and the American Woman to comment on women’s work (“Loose Threads”), showing the beauty of a repetitive pattern of arms rising and falling as she manipulates found footage of a genial brigade of children passing a hat from head to head (in the delightful “Ruth Perry’s Pictures”), or marching live dancers down a set of steps onto the stage to amplify the “choreography” of people descending from a bus (“Welcome Aboard”), Sarris combines video and dance to make something that is more than the sum of both parts.
In her savvy efforts, she is amply abetted by her collaborators. Frank Pahl, dancer as well as music man extraordinaire, creates imaginative soundtracks with his group, called only a mother, for these silent films. Pahl’s music draws on everything from New Orleans jazz to nifty whistling. Also contributing are dancers Lisa Johnson, Laurie Zebele, Jeremy Steward (dancing with new amplitude), Whitley Setrakian (she and Steward are choreographers in their own right), and Setrakian’s 9-year-old son, Sam Genson.
If there’s a sameness to the patterns by which her choreography and videography mesh, or even a wearying effect in the use of a moving backdrop (film) for every work, Sarris makes up for it with movement that speaks clearly on its own, zigging and zagging boldly, then gently, through space with efficient and telling grace, and with sensitive selection of film material.
Like Sarris herself, we want to know more about these people who have lost their filmed past to time and rummage sales, and we share her musings about what fate awaits her own video investigation of who she is and who she might yet be.
"Loose Threads" continues at 8 p.m. tonight and Saturday, and 7 p.m., Sunday, at Performance Network, 408 W. Washington St. For ticket information, phone 663-0681.