Ros Warby Review
From the Phoenix to Icarus, hope and despair are easily recognized as feathered things. In her latest work Monumental, Australian choreographer Ros Warby excavates the warm blood, quick intelligence, and even the insularity of birds. She creates an understated, yet emotionally potent meditation on vulnerability, loss, and beauty.
Monumental made its South Florida debut Friday and Saturday evening at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater. For the first several minutes, the lithe, classically-trained dancer barely moved her feet. Wearing a leotard and white-plumed tutu, Warby steadied her lower body until it was as still as the branch of a tree, then she released her hands to the elegant language of swan and gull. Transcending straightforward allusions to flutter and flight, Warby’s complex gestures possess the fluency and controlled elegance of an ancient art.
Designer Margie Medlin’s grainy 35mm film projections and Helen Mountfort’s mournful cello solos propel Monumental’s powerful emotional currents without overwhelming Warby’s often understated choreography. This team of long-time collaborators possesses the sublime ability to suggest other art forms without becoming them, thereby sanctifying the role of movement as Monumental’s primary mode of expression.
Medlin’s film footage injects the theatricality of cinema into Warby’s choreography without becoming disruptively cinematic. A shimmering close up of Warby’s eyes, nose, and mouth, for example, recalls the haunting romanticism of silent film. A wide sweeping shot of a bleak shoreline darkened by ailing birds veers toward drama without careening into a didactic accident of melodrama.
Undoubtedly inspired by icon and mentor, Deborah Hay, Warby’s choreography utilizes vocal work in a fresh, interesting way. Pushing beyond its origin as the vocal extension of breath and movement, Warby’s utters playful gibberish so skillfully that she creates a theatricality, operatic and lyrical in the first half and guttural and combative in the second.
Though non-linear, Monumental journeys steadily from vibrancy toward destruction. Warby appears in a dark tunic, pants, and cap, suggesting a soldier. Light, lyrical hands give way to solid, earthbound feet. Her vocal work ebbs from the lyrical Latinate vowels of the first half to more Germanic, alliterative, hard-sounding speech.
For sheer reasons of logistics, not to mention ego, it is very difficult for a solo performer to turn the attention away from her, but that’s just what Monumental’s carefully crafted metaphor and movement does. In the performance’s final seconds, Warby removes the black cap and her face is flooded with white resplendent white light as she lifts her face fully to the public. She uses this crescendo not to exude “I am beautiful,” but rather to say: “Beauty exists.” Knowing what is monumental to some will go unnoticed by many; Warby exhibits the courage of a seasoned solo performer.
Monumental made its South Florida debut Friday and Saturday evening at the Arsht Center’s Carnival Studio Theater. For the first several minutes, the lithe, classically-trained dancer barely moved her feet. Wearing a leotard and white-plumed tutu, Warby steadied her lower body until it was as still as the branch of a tree, then she released her hands to the elegant language of swan and gull. Transcending straightforward allusions to flutter and flight, Warby’s complex gestures possess the fluency and controlled elegance of an ancient art.
Designer Margie Medlin’s grainy 35mm film projections and Helen Mountfort’s mournful cello solos propel Monumental’s powerful emotional currents without overwhelming Warby’s often understated choreography. This team of long-time collaborators possesses the sublime ability to suggest other art forms without becoming them, thereby sanctifying the role of movement as Monumental’s primary mode of expression.
Medlin’s film footage injects the theatricality of cinema into Warby’s choreography without becoming disruptively cinematic. A shimmering close up of Warby’s eyes, nose, and mouth, for example, recalls the haunting romanticism of silent film. A wide sweeping shot of a bleak shoreline darkened by ailing birds veers toward drama without careening into a didactic accident of melodrama.
Undoubtedly inspired by icon and mentor, Deborah Hay, Warby’s choreography utilizes vocal work in a fresh, interesting way. Pushing beyond its origin as the vocal extension of breath and movement, Warby’s utters playful gibberish so skillfully that she creates a theatricality, operatic and lyrical in the first half and guttural and combative in the second.
Though non-linear, Monumental journeys steadily from vibrancy toward destruction. Warby appears in a dark tunic, pants, and cap, suggesting a soldier. Light, lyrical hands give way to solid, earthbound feet. Her vocal work ebbs from the lyrical Latinate vowels of the first half to more Germanic, alliterative, hard-sounding speech.
For sheer reasons of logistics, not to mention ego, it is very difficult for a solo performer to turn the attention away from her, but that’s just what Monumental’s carefully crafted metaphor and movement does. In the performance’s final seconds, Warby removes the black cap and her face is flooded with white resplendent white light as she lifts her face fully to the public. She uses this crescendo not to exude “I am beautiful,” but rather to say: “Beauty exists.” Knowing what is monumental to some will go unnoticed by many; Warby exhibits the courage of a seasoned solo performer.