Rachel Thorne Germond performing in Memoir/Art/Dance (2023) in WORKSESSION in Four Walls at One Brooklyn Bridge Park, Brooklyn NY produced by Chashama and New Dance Alliance - March 2023.
THE BROOKLYN RAIL - March/April 2023
WORKSession in Four Walls
Four interdisciplinary artists showcase the moving body in a salon-like setting.
By Karen Hildebrand
Inside a storefront gallery that faces the East River at Brooklyn Bridge park, four discrete performance spaces are mapped out on the concrete floor. Audience members grab spots on a bench at the center of the room where they can shift around as lights go up on each makeshift stage in turn. It’s an intimate performance. The seventy-four year-old Karen Bernard confronts the fear of aging by dropping unceremoniously to the floor and getting back up; Rachel Thorne Germond looks back on a life in dance by sharing from her personal journals; filmmaker Jil Guyon embodies grief as a moving human sculpture; and Lisa Parra sings an opera composed of cocktail party chatter. Interdisciplinary artists all, for WORKSession in Four Walls they showcase their common language of the dancing body, beautifully depicted in four unique ways.
Re: Memoir/Art/Dance
While Parra’s Family Reunion_side2 excited me with its singularity and polish in the moment, it’s Germond’s Memoir/Dance/Art that won’t leave me alone in retrospect. Germond takes on an ambitious mix of narrative, projected image, recorded text, props, and movement as she looks back at her NYC dance life from the distance of her parent’s home in New Hampshire, where she spent the pandemic lockdown. Things get a little cluttered. Her set resembles a campsite with a halfway constructed tent. Her physical presence is her strongest asset. She plays both a Marilyn Monroe character in a black sheath dress and pink high heels, and a version of herself in rain jacket and sensible shoes. She does a charming, brief dance in the rain jacket. One small scene captures an appealing quirky essence: Marilyn raises a pink conch shell to her ear and listens, then finds her way into the tent where she can barely stand upright and pokes an arm through the metal supports to check for rain. It looks like she’s wearing the tent as a hat. At the end, Germond repeats the sequence, this time raising one of Marilyn’s pink heels to her ear as if the past is phoning in.
Read the full review here:
The Brooklyn Rail
https://brooklynrail.org/2023/04/dance/WORKSession-in-Four-Walls
“She is a stern, unfancy, intellectually enticing artist, tough in her aesthetic.
Germond works in a purely abstract realm and yet mines subtle conflicts and animosities inherent in movement and ensemble configuration. She doesn’t tell stories, but she explores battles, alliances, break-ups and betrayals, rarely relying on the traditional beauties of flowing contemporary dance. Who her dancers are touching at any given moment and why are questions that keep recurring, just as the ever-changing patterns concern human will, control, isolation and even doom much more than aesthetic confection.
While the viewer remains most of the time compelled, wondering what’s next, her work is very difficult to put into words.”
- The Philadelphia Inquirer
“In Rachel Thorne Germond’s choreography “the body speaks of itself as a political battleground. In these highly ironic works, questions of freedom, control, sexuality, and identity are played out... Sometimes indulging in arresting non sequiturs, her work has a madness about it that is probably just right for our times.”
“She evaluates her own choreographic voice in terms of an ‘element of tension and release’ that animates her performances. The goal is not just ‘beautiful movement’, but the tangible and powerful presentation of a message.”
"Germond's Rejoinder sings a sweet tune of separation, sex and innocent love as she and Kristina Fluty caressingly plunge and aggressively soar throughout the space in crisp, clean movements that abound with energy and grace. A cameo performance by Andrew Janetti as a "sawman" contributes literal meaning to the dance; he saws a block of wood to represent a severed relationship. It is a refreshing display of emotional transparency."
- Jessica Weiss, The Brooklyn Rail
An emerging choreographer "definitely worth a look"
- Gia Kourlas, Time Out/New York Magazine
- Asimina Chremos, Time Out Chicago
and brought down the house. The piece reveals Marilyn Monroe as both icon and human being ...a poignant reminder that we all have a bit of Marilyn in us."
- Kathleen Duffy, Chicago, IL
“It’s about transformation. I get to explore moving in ways I would never move, to see what it means to move like a guy, or, in the case of Marilyn Monroe, like an extreme female.”