Allergic to Stuffiness (and Capital Letters)

A performance by locust feels like a party. In the minutes before
their last show, mockumentary at On the Boards, the dancers were
already onstage while the audience walked in. They greeted friends,
nodded at strangers, stretched, bopped around, and warmed up to mellow
club music. Instead of disappearing backstage to wait for their cues,
they sat on a couch near the front row.

mockumentary was a hash of pop culture and high art, with
three video screens, passages of mock ballet and explosive funk, a
subplot about zombies searching for love, dance segments on roller
skates and BMX bikes, and singer/comedian Reggie Watts guest-starring
as a bitchy choreographer: “No, no, more weird!” he shouted at
despondent dancers. “This thing that you are doing, it looks like
something fell from a skyscraper and landed on a small paper plate…
don’t you people ever have sex?”

locust has an ambivalent relationship with modern dance. Its members
have toured internationally and worked with the city’s most prestigious
companies—Spectrum Dance Theater, Pacific Northwest Ballet, Pat
Graney, others—but choreographer Amy O’Neal is allergic to
stuffiness. She grew up in Texas, but when she was 13 and 14, her
father, an officer in the air force, was stationed in Ankara, Turkey.
O’Neal used to sneak out of the house at
night and into Turkish
dance clubs. That story is O’Neal’s foundation myth.

locust’s new show, crushed at the Moore Theatre, is more
austere than mockumentary. During a rehearsal last week, music
director Zeke Keeble beat-boxed and played samples, sitting on a wooden
crate that he occasionally beat on like a drum. The show opens with a
video of a farmer in a cap and mustache running across his field and
accidentally stomping on a locust. The video is comedy, with Keeble
making buzzing/stomping noises into his microphone, but the rest of
crushed feels like an elegy for the stomped: lovers grappling
and throwing each other away, dancers crawling like insects in robotic
rhythms, then fighting in a battle royal, shoving each other violently
from darkness through squares of bright, white light.

The violence of the choreography inspired somebody to call the
police during a video shoot for crushed earlier this month. “We
have been using this fabulous green wall on 35th in West Seattle,”
O’Neal wrote on the locust website. “It was dark, 6:00 p.m. The last
image we were filming was the shadows of seven people running around
and shoving each other, using the headlights from two cars on the wall.
When we were just finishing, the cops rolled up. They told us they got
a call that six people were beating up one person. We told him we were
shooting a dance video and to come see the show at the Moore. Other
cops were calling him on his walkie-talkie thing, and he told them,
‘Yeah, these guys are just shooting a dance video, and I am gonna see
if it is any good.'”

After their rehearsal last week, O’Neal, Keeble, and I sat down at
the Sitting Room for a few minutes.

What’s that box you were sitting on and beating?

Keeble: It’s called a cajón. It came from South
American slaves whose instruments were taken away, so they turned
shipping crates into drums. They use it in flamenco music, though it’s
not indigenous to Spain. It’s really just a plywood box I bought at
Guitar Center. mockumentary was a technical nightmare, playing
keyboards, guitars, drums, and beat-boxing—the whole thing was
done on the fly through a loop transfer. For crushed, I can go
from my car to rehearsal in two trips instead of eight.

Who are the best pop-music choreographers these days?

O’Neal: I don’t really know. I don’t watch MTV anymore; it really
pisses me off—it’s mostly reality shows and hardly any
videos.

So you’re stuck on Janet Jackson?

K: She loves Janet Jackson.

O: Yes, I love Janet Jackson. I like Beyoncé a lot. And
Justin Timberlake is a badass dancer. I’ve spent the past year dancing
in clubs more. It’s different from a room full of modern
dancers—a lot of them don’t understand rhythm in that way. They
don’t have a lot of edge. They’re foofy. Sometimes I even have to tell
my dancers to drop the modern-dance persona and just bust.

Tell me about your dancers.

O: I’m attracted to dancers with a harshness and an edge—and
also a fear of being vulnerable, like they’re daring you to watch
them.

K: They’ve all got a depth and a real grit, each of them, relative
to most dancers.

O: But they’re really highly trained and know their shit. Ellie
[Sandstrom, who has danced with O’Neal since they were at Cornish in
1998] is such a fucking powerhouse, an anomaly of nature.

K: We have a joke about Ellie—Amy’s version of warming up is
to stretch for 30 minutes, but Ellie’s version of warming up is to kick
her leg over her head, then going out to smoke a cigarette. She’s ready
to go.

O: But she also has a clarity of movement, so precise. That
combination is really rare.

And the others?

O: Jessie Smith [who is also a member of theater group Implied
Violence] is gritty, too. She’s a little rough around the edges, kind
of delicate and kind of fuck you at the same time. Ben Maestas
has a subtle sexiness and a dry sense of humor onstage. And Amy Clem is
just bootylicious—few dancers know how to pop it and also feel a
tondu. Those are prerequisites for locust. You either feel it or
you don’t.

Everybody in the company went to Cornish—where else have you
studied?

O: When I was 19, I got a summer scholarship to study at the Martha
Graham Center in New York. The teacher would criticize us for making
stuff up. She’d say, “It’s not Graham enough, make it more like
Martha’s work.” They weren’t interested in helping us foster our
individual movement, so I said: “Fuck this, I’m going down the street
to take a jazz class and sweat.” The teacher said, “I respect
that.”

What do you all have against capitalization?

O: Zeke and I just like the way it looks. The capital letters are
not breaking up the line, and we like to keep stuff a little more
casual.