Moving with the creepy-crawlies
Dance explores relationship between bug and humans
AirDance New Mexico is bracing for an aerial infestation of the buggy kind. “Entomography,” the latest performance from these highdangling dancers, explores the relationship between creepycrawlies and their human invaders at the AirDance Art Space next weekend.
“One of our dancers started talking about how she likes to watch videos of creepy bug stuff and how it scares her, but she couldn’t help but watch,” director Joanna Furgal said.
The final impetus arrived when the dancers realized they
could use green bags to encase themselves over aerial props such as silks, hammocks, stilts and a rope spider web, all from a 20-foot ceiling.
A Victorian steampunk-dressed male explorer inadvertently stumbles upon the bug colony.
“He isn’t sure whether it’s sinister or not,” Furgal said. “His journey through this world of giant bugs is sort of the through line. He gets touched by the magic slime bag. He discovers it and it falls on him and he tries to escape it. It’s sort of how we interact with the world and change it instead of becoming part of it.”
The explorer confronts an encyclopedia of insects, including a moth, a butterfly, some black widows, crickets and a giant slug.
“We’re trying not to be too heavy-handed,” Furgal said. “There’s an ecological undertone, as there is of white male privilege in the world.”
The dancers are Cortney Baca, Amy Bourque, Christina Cavaleri, Ronnie Gialouris, Tara Kolberg, Zachary Sears, Kristen Woods and Furgal.
“We’ve had a lot of real bugs trying to audition lately,” she added.