could be worse | real.live.people | Walltown Children’s Theatre, Durham | Mar. 22-23
In a January 27 preview of Anna Barker’s new work could be worse, the choreographer and her artistic partner, Leah Wilks, threw some well-earned brickbats at some of the pandering elements in popular and high-art dance performances that they’d witnessed, over the years.
Sinuous, simpering hip and shoulder rolls, vertical synchronized-swimming moves, and a bathing beauty pose or two, served up (sometimes, at least) with ingratiating smiles, fully embodied—and ridiculed—the ultra-lounge stylings of musicians like Esquivel and Ferrante and Teicher.
Those roasts will come as small surprise at most to dance and theater aficionados who have followed Barker’s incisive, funny, and often autobiographical work with her Durham company, real.live.people, over its first 10 years on conventional stages and off the beaten path for live performance in both genres.
Ever since her groundbreaking premiere, it’s not me, it’s you, packed Motorco in 2014 as the first offering of the intrepid Durham Independent Dance Artists initiative, Barker has made a point of closely interrogating interpersonal, professional, and artistic relationships at the same time that many other young women in her audience, just coming into their own, were doing the same in their own lives.
In 2021, Barker completed and screened her first feature film, Level Up, a comic and revealing backstage account of a dancemaker’s vexations while producing her own work.
“It was a narrative about Leah and I, now in our thirties, trying to make sense of being a dance artist,” Barker says. “It was also a way of documenting my works, because it’s hard to document dance.”
But could be worse marks the first new live work from real.live.people since 2018. Fittingly for Barker, the title is a punch line: a three-word kiss-off to four pandemic years that posed some of the most existential threats that the choreographer—and her art form—have faced.
She and Wilks had just begun exploratory work on a new project as the pandemic hit, plunging all live performances and rehearsals in dance into sudden and total eclipse.
“We felt very disconnected to our dance practice,” Barker recalls. “The stand-ins for dance—dancing on Zoom, watching livestreams of work without an audience—felt very hollow to us.”
On a personal, experiential level, the disconnect was even more profound. “It was the only time in my life I ever felt disembodied—like I didn’t have access to that, not only as a creative outlet but as a way to experience the world.”
Barker pauses, then adds, “That’s why isolation and dissociation exist in the new work. We existed in that space for a long while.”
A chronicle of such a time could easily be fraught. But given her penchant for autobiographical comedy, Barker manages to artfully replicate onstage not only the physical constraints under which she and Wilks had to create entire sections of the work but the similarly harrowing economic constraints they experienced as their livelihoods as dance and movement teachers began to dwindle during lockdown.
By now, the first notes of modern dance’s well-worn war-horse, Ravel’s Boléro, have all but become a punch line in themselves, the usual signal for 15 minutes of stem-winding tedium. But a listless AI voice, nervelessly intoning a lengthy list of occupations, subverts the programming in could be worse: “Personal costume designer. Cheesemonger. Prenatal movement coach. Farmhand. Pet sitter. Elder companion. End-of-life companion.”
As the roll call continues, the audience laughs as we realize we’re listening to a list of every job and gig these artists have had to take to make a living before and during the pandemic. It’s everything they’ve had to do, on top of their artistic occupations, to make this art and this evening possible.
Then a list of prices and commodities follow: hourly pay rates and production costs for food, supplies, and services. Were we in a restaurant, this would be a public reading of the bill. There also would be every expectation that we would pay for all of it. But as things stand in our culture, the artists have to, instead.
“We couldn’t make the work without addressing that,” Barker notes, “not only our history of having to make our work with all these other jobs we do but the history of labor and effort by us, the loss of income, and never being able to really make that up and recover from that. We’ve never been able to make a living as an artist. We’ve had to contort ourselves into all sorts of positions, sometimes many at a time, to continue.”
“How do we want to relate to this now? How can we?” Barker asks. “Is there a way to change our relationship to this history of effort, and how we want to move forward with that, in the dance world, and the world at large?”
The joke turns, as Barker and Wilks execute their acts of choreographic resistance. By the end of the Boléro sequence, both characters are clearly exhausted. Sweat flings off their heads and one is almost limping; the other’s breathing hard, down on one knee, on the side.
In the moment, both look around themselves and look back, in bewilderment perhaps, or anger, at all that they’ve embodied, and the price they’ve paid to do it. In these and other moments, could be worse forces us to consider the costs, on several levels, of being an artist and persevering in making and presenting one’s art.
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