dance

The Dance Apocalypse: You never know what you're gonna get

Nicole Bindler and Gabrielle Revlock offer up mock fights, anatomy lessons, apologies, comedy and, oh yeah, dance. 

Revlock (right) and Bindler get scrappy.
FringeArts

What sticks with me most from The Dance Apocalypse, nearly 20 hours later, is the moment when Nicole Bindler unzipped the top portion of her jumpsuit, fell to her knees, grabbed a barely one-inch pinch of stomach skin, and made her belly button talk.

“She swims laps at the Y sometimes, but she never wears a bikini anymore. I never get to see the other belly buttons,” Bindler’s naval lamented. “She used to have a belly button ring, and she’d play with me all the time, but then she went to a homeopathic doctor who told her the nickel was seeping into her bloodstream and causing chronic fucking fatigue, so she took me out.”

Alongside that body talk, with Bindler’s face contorted into exaggerated misery, Gabrielle Revlock was behind her on stage, on her back, clapping along with the words. Revlock was also contorted — she’d bent herself into a spine-snapping pretzel form, her arms laced though her legs, which rested on her shoulders.

It was hilarious. It was weird. I didn’t really get it. I doubt I was really supposed to. But it was also wildly entertaining — I couldn't keep my eyes off of the two. Their unpredictability was captivating.

There were segments of dance, of course — of frantic gesticulating, choreographed (and quite realistic) fight scenes, with hair pulling and smacking, of guttural grunts and thrashings. It was movement expressing attitudes and emotions that weren't clear; Revlock and Bindler switched so rapidly from arguing, to laughing, to galloping around the stage, to mock Q-and-A with the audience that we didn't know really what they were expressing, or at times, what we were feeling.

“Be prepared to be slightly disoriented,” read some pre-show info. I was. But I was also delightfully disoriented.

The Dance Apocalypse, a free show part of "Scratch Night" at Fringe Arts on April 7, began in the lobby with an announcement from a staff member:

“If you are in a relationship, enter through the third door. If you are single, enter through the second door. If you have to pee, enter through the first door.”

As we walked into the theater, a group of about 20 was performing a dance — they’d form two lines, with partners cascading down the aisle; they’d grasp hands and spin in a circle; they’d jump joyfully up and down while smacking their knees. Revlock and Bindler have been teaching “CardioCreativity” classes since Feb. 17; these must have been the participants who now get to engage in the performance. The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, by the way, awarded Revlock a $25,000 grant for the development and final performance of The Dance Apocalypse and CardioCreativity classes. 

Bullet points best serve the description of the rest of the evening, I think:

• At the beginning of the night, we’re asked to take out our smart phones and watch two YouTube videos of Revlock and Bindler. Bindler’s naked in hers.
• The two lined up on stage for ass-smacks from audience members who raised their hands when asked if they didn’t like the performance.
• Revlock and Bindler spent about five minutes of the performance apologizing to various people. One was the girlfriend of a man Revlock made out with for four minutes as part of a performance. Bindler apologized to a past audience member who wrote on a performance comment card that the duo’s work was “bitchy, painful, [an] overuse of white privilege and female privilege.”
• In the performance program packet (which includes locks of the dancers’ hair), there is also a diagram of the internal structures of the clitoris. On stage, Bindler uses the bent-over (clothed) crotch of Revlock to demonstrate where these can be found on a live human.

The evening served as a chance to raise awareness (and money) for Chicken Fight, a film the two hope to make. They need to raise money from the private sector, and are aiming for $1 million. It’s on Kickstarter. Here’s the trailer.

The Dance Apocalypse echoes the work for which Bindler and Revlock received attention in 2011, I made this for you, presented as part of the 2011 A.W.A.R.D. Show here in Philly. They described the performance as challenging the “notions of competition and conventional forms of beauty by using biting wit and playful commentary…I made this for you deepens the intimacy between performer and audience and allows for everyone to see and be seen.”

At the A.W.A.R.D. Show, they said they essentially skewered the format of dance competition and raised questions about the nature of dance itself.

“Women competing at the A.W.A.R.D. Show keeps women from supporting one another,” Revlock said last night, to cheers.

That’s how the evening felt — like a great, collaborative show of support for these two offbeat performers, who manage to enthrall their audience, no matter how far the presentation departs from the traditional. It was witty, playful and sometimes challenging. Therein lies the charm.

If Chicken Fight manages to make its way to the big screen, it will be yet another chance for audiences to make what they will of Bindler and Revlock's innovative and provocative work. 

And if they think it's awful, that's cool — as last night's haters lined up to take a wallop at the performer's butts, the two kept shouting:

"That's okay! You can hate it! Every opinion is valid!"