Nancy Karp Performance

Nancy Karp is a well-known choreographer who has been making work in San Francisco for the over two decades. Her San Francisco based company, Nancy Karp + Dancers was found in 1980. Karp has created over 70 dance works for her company. Together with her dancers, they have toured throughout the United States and abroad, including Germany, India, and Japan. She has also received numerous grants and awards for her work: Bay Area Dance Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, a Fulbright Senior Research Fellowship to India in 1995, and many more.

Her two hours dance pieces were performed in San Francisco ODC Theatre recently, from 4th-13th of November, which was titled “25th Anniversary Retrospective Season”. The performance was divided into six pieces, including “Jumping Phase (1978)”, “Arashi/Storm (1992)”, “Jaisalmer (2000)”, Trio Set (2005)”, “The Night’s Mascara (2005), and “Il Mercato (2001)”. The theme for the whole performance is rather abstract; from my point of view, all the pieces are about the development of body movements. She works a lot in developing the body movements; combine them, recombine them, and elaborate on them to demonstrate their beauty.

Several formal elements should be considered for the whole performance to work out. These include space, time, and dynamics. The stage that was used to perform is not spacious at all with low ceiling, which creates limited space for the dancers to perform. Despite that, the dancers used the space effectively, which made the pieces appear astonishing. In “Jumping Phase”, the first piece of the performance, the dancers stood upstage, side by side with each other, and hardly moved. Six dancers, both males and females, jumped in place and accented particular beats of a 12-count phrase. This piece focused more on the level changes, low and high when jumping. They began in unison, gradually moving of phase as the piece progresses; finally returned to the initial phase for the final 12 counts in unison. The time taken to do the whole piece was not long at all; it only took less than 5 minutes.

On the other hand, the second piece “Arashi/Storm” were more dynamic than the first one. Dancers moved a lot in space, both upstage and downstage. The piece started with one dancer moving slow in space, followed by the second and third dancers with gradually increasing in their speed. The movements were smooth and repeated several times; all focusing on the body parts movements, especially their hands. Chinese orchestra type of music accompanied their energetic movements. Over the time, they started to gradually slower their speed and ended in slow movements just like the beginning.

“Jaisalmer”, the next piece performed, began with fast beat music and dancers were moving in high-speed. They moved across the space, in both low and high levels, but mostly they stayed low on the floor. In this piece, it seemed that each dancer was following each other movement, one after the other. However, as the music began to slow down in the middle, the dancers moved slower according to the beats decreasing their energy used.

Karp’s “Trio Set” was the fourth piece to be performed. This piece was based on Edward Albee’s play “Three