Event

Rozelle Polido with guest Kelly Bowker

At a time when technology seems to have everyone constantly connected with their family, friends, and acquaintances (not to mention their pets), why do feelings of loneliness, helplessness, and fear continue to plague us?

breathe;ing blue in shades of three, two, and one: tomorrow is a dance theatre piece that displays writer and choreographer Rozelle Polido’s bewilderment at this predicament. It serves not as an answer, but instead reflects the emotions that season ruminating over such intensely uncomfortable and personal questions, exploring how our individual desire for control conflicts with our human need for connection. Polido sanguinely suggests that collectively, we may be able to find harmony among the two in order to secure and transcend ourselves through time and space, and to fully experience ourselves as part of a greater, and perhaps even eternal community. Audience members are invited to bravely trace this journey with the dancers in an aurally and visually dynamic collaboration of poetry, music, stage pictures, and contemporary dance.

The stage is set to reflect the “comforts” of “home,” or rather, the way we fill our spaces with physical things that make us feel placed, safe, and connected. Before the audience lies a backdrop of empty frames; a shredded couch with its stuffing falling out; curtains which when opened reveal not the outside world, but a black wall; a tattered blanket; a pillar plastered with telephone numbers scribbled on scraps of paper; a disconnected telephone. As the piece progresses, these surrounding furnishings fail to console and instead, a sense of confinement grows among the dancers and the audience. While dancers, desperate for solace, fling themselves against the futilities of these objects and the vulnerabilities of each other, the physical environment reveals to us that perhaps comfort and connection are less tangible than we think, that they cannot so easily be held.