New play recasts Oedipus's mother as a dancer navigating the modern age.
What stories does the body tell? As we learn more about how our cells carry the memory of past events — even of past generations — that question moves further into the heart of cultural practice. It’s no accident that many of the most potent movements in our own city have to do with, well, movement. From art gatherings like SOIL and Frequency to DJ-driven dance nights, Tulsa’s creative community is helping us see that embodiment is where our experience of life can be understood and transformed.
Heller Theatre Company stepped into that zone last weekend with Rocking (A Play with Dance), an ambitious, imaginative new work by Texas playwright Andra Laine Hunter, developed through Heller’s mission to foster original plays.
The piece weaves the tragic Greek tale of Oedipus’ mother Jocasta (the commanding yet vulnerable Machele Dill) into a present-day story about one woman’s artistic and physical generativity. That woman, Lillian (the astonishing Mikah Vaclaw), is a professional dancer who finds herself mysteriously compelled to create movement very different from what she’s given to do in her dance company — movement that turns out to be carrying forward the lived experiences of Jocasta and others from an earlier age, which obliquely parallel, forecast, and guide her own.
As Lillian navigates her own challenges, including an unexpected, non-viable pregnancy — all in literal conversation with the ancient figures speaking to and through her — she moves through visceral questions about fate, creative agency, and womanhood that reach across time.
Co-directed by Hunter and Dill, with dramaturgy by Michael Wright, Rocking is a palimpsest, a liminal space where timelines and destinies mingle. Yet it allows Lillian to be her own fully realized character. (The roles of others in the play — Lillian’s director and partner Nathan, the ancient Greek figures Ammon and Ione — are somewhat less fully fleshed out.) As Lillian, Vaclaw brought a cool presence that made even surreal moments, like her conferring with Jocasta and a modern-day OB/GYN at the same time, feel believable and natural. And her clear, decisive movement (in striking choreography by Gail Algeo that carried the full lineage of dance, from classical to postmodern) communicated what words can’t. A forceful arcing of Vaclaw’s arm over her head telegraphed “help,” “tick-tock,” “the dome of the sky,” “then and now,” “which way to go?” — and a dozen other possible images suggested by dance’s prismatic language.
The play’s strongest episodes came when words and movement met, opening an alternate dimension within its own version of magical realism, where something deeper lay bubbling — when, for example, Lillian danced a devastating, poetic monologue as Jocasta delivered it, or when three of the play’s characters from the ancient world gathered center stage with Lillian during her labor with a stillborn baby. In the back-and-forth rocking of their linked forms, they helped each other share the weight of birth and grief across millennia, bringing all their unresolved stories toward completion. As a dancer myself, I found it moving that after thousands of years of suffering, Jocasta sought out a dancer — in the playwright’s words, “someone who lived fully in their body” — to help her express her story and support that woman in her own. The ability of movement to transmute and process human experience is unique, and Rocking brings its power into full view.
This isn’t an easy play, even apart from its heavy subject matter. Layering multiple narratives, complex ideas, and dense metaphors into such a compact frame means some moments edge toward elusive.
“Drown or swim,” Jocasta tells Lillian at one point, and like Lillian with her ancient interlocutors, I felt the urgency of keeping close to the rich, evocative, incantatory words of the playwright so as to stay with the current. (It would be interesting to see this work produced on a larger scale, where Hunter’s intriguing experiments with lighting, blocking, and soundscapes — the relentless dull vibration of an unanswered phone, the beating of wings — could be more expansively realized.) But Hunter’s (and Heller’s) gamble on this kind of storytelling is worth it.
Despite — or maybe because of — the mysteries the play moved me through, I felt less lost at the end than I had when I walked in from my everyday life.
The world of Rocking is daring and heartfelt, a mythological present where many stories reach for resolution through the imagination of the body. A work of art is its own kind of body, a living act through which the elements of life are held and transmitted — fate, facts, and feelings; past, present, and future. Rocking’s intertwining of all these sorts of creation raises the question: how do we move with our lives, not just get stuck with them? Bearing stories, bearing ourselves: this is what our bodies do, and what theatre can do as well.
Next from Heller Theatre Company: Second Sunday Serials, Sept. 10.
