Past, future collide in ‘Butterfly Effect’
The future has come to meet us.
This phrase has been resounding in my ears since Saturday, Jan. 25. The future has come to meet us.
The phrase was accompanied by images — smokefilled room and dangling branches, runway model cloaked cocoonlike in red, voices chanting in ancient languages, boardroom suits and cackling laughter, umbrellas drenched in rain. It is righteous anger, raised fists, women emerging, rolling, scattering, tiptoeing, defiant, insistent, powerful. It is fluttering wings and drums, fluttering wings and drums, fluttering wings and smoke and drums.
The future has come to meet us.
It is a barrage of pulsing sound, ringing voice, stomping feet, spinning spines that persists, quaking in my cells in the wake of Dance Brigade’s “Butterfly Effect,” which will persist until Feb. 9, at Dance Mission Theater. The future has come to meet us.
A fitting event for the start of a year steeped in tumult, “Butterfly Effect” is an eveninglength dance work conceived and directed by Artistic Director Krissy Keefer for 15 dancers and musicians that travels across Dance Mission’s various studio spaces. Each room transports viewers to a new realm — a dystopian future, a woodland night, a highart house of fashion — in which exquisitely crafted, politically charged, unapologetic dancing unfurls. The work is a rumination on climate change that, in a distinctly Keeferesque fashion, is also a call to action.
‘There is no time to wait,” it urges. “Death and destruction are enveloping us,” it reminds. “We yearn, return the earth, the night,” the closing song booms in old Norse.
The work is charged and defiant, and yet polished in a way that only Keefer’s 40plus years of fervent dance making can generate. The company displays both grit and great prowess in moves culled from a jazzy modern aesthetic.
The movement vocabulary seems neither entirely innovative nor stale, somehow. It serves as a bridge connecting past(s) and future(s), then as now in the form of frolicking circle dance, then as now in the depiction of picket line protests, then as now a single female body buckling under the weight of it all and reemerging, phoenixlike, from ash.
Bruce “Mui” Ghent’s original music for a band of female taiko drum and percussion players invokes ancestral wisdom, calling the gods into the room. The total effect is a resplendent cry for consideration, a demand to be seen and heard.
This timetraveling action filters the noise of 2020 in a way that couples wild abandon with calculated attention to detail, embodying the wisdom derived from chaos theory that even small things, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wing, bear great effects on farreaching systems.
The future has come to meet us.
And “Butterfly Effect” begs to know, where do you stand?