Collateral Damage

Audiences can expect dark drama from Matthew Smith’s Admittance. Smith and his two choreographers, Deborah Jinza Thayer and Cathy Wright, have woven together two stories emblematic of the culture of conformity and denial in 1950s America. One story concerns a soldier trying to discover the truth about the secret radiation testing he’s endured, and the other is about Smith’s own mother’s institutionalization in a mental hospital and the resulting cover-up in his family.

The work is a moving, jarring mix of the living and the mechanical. Figures clutch and twist, torqued by the physical force of their emotions, or they twitch and shake as if electrified. Storm winds scatter them in swirls, but their own breathing is a powerful binding force. Thayer’s work, telling the soldier’s story, is concerned with physical force, while Wright’s work, focused on the family story, is more intimate. Yet both share the aesthetic struggle of emotion as motion. Smith’s sound—an engine hum, a rumble, a shriek heard through a thinning filter, a skein of nickels dropping—backs the dance’s clash between the organic and inorganic.

“I hope it’s an intense piece,” Smith says of Admittance. The action may be set in the 1950s, but it’s not a historical piece, he says, because damage from denial is a constant in human life, a force for isolation and misunderstanding that “has laid the foundation for most acts of violence and war throughout history.”

Smith also sees a culture of fear in modern America that’s not unlike the fear of the 1950s, when the country was spooked by communism and atomic warfare. Still, Admittance will ultimately leave viewers with a ray of hope—a moment of connection in a dark world.

Dec. 4–6. Ritz Theater, 345 13th Ave. NE, Mpls., 612-436-1129