Four Is Enough

It's nine o'clock on a Tuesday night, and at the Pillsbury House Theatre in south Minneapolis, four people—two men, two women, all between the ages of twenty-seven and thirty-three—are sitting around a conference table. Megan Odell, brown-haired, with a clear complexion and wide, attentive eyes, pushes a stack of color copies onto the table—images of salt harvesting from around the world—and starts telling a story about an opera performed in a salt mine. Meanwhile, Vanessa Voskuil, a slender, graceful woman with long, chocolate-colored hair, gets up to put a CD in a boom box. She heard this track on a listener-request hour, she explains, and went straight to a store to buy the CD. The two men are both fair-skinned, but the resemblance ends there. Galen Treuer is short and energetic, his very dark eyes flitting around the room. “I had this image,” he begins, and now everyone is talking of salt harvesting from around the world—and starts telling a story about an opera performed in a salt mine. Meanwhile, Vanessa Voskuil, a slender, graceful woman with long, chocolate-colored hair, puts a CD in a boom box. She heard this track on a listener-request hour, she explains, and went straight to a store to buy the CD. The two men are both fair-skinned, but the resemblance ends there. Galen Treuer is short and energetic, his very dark eyes flitting around the room. “I had this image,” he begins, and now everyone is talking at once, except Noah Bremer. Tall and loose-limbed, he lounges like a Cubist sculpture, his body a collection of impossible angles. He looks tired, as he turns Odell’s images around to look at them from all four sides. When he does talk, he’s clear and direct, taking up the others’ ideas and moving them forward.

Voskuil starts the track—Wellington’s Victory, by Beethoven. The martial music, with its crescendo of gun percussion, catches everyone’s imagination, and soon they’re thinking out loud together. They laugh and sometimes interrupt each other. But under their ease, there’s a polite professionalism. These aren’t just friends sitting around and having fun. This is Live Action Set, and this is rehearsal.

The Set is rehearsing for this month’s Momentum: New Dance Works. Walker Art Center, and commissions four Minnesota-based emerging and midcareer performing artists or groups to create work to perform in two weekends of double bills. The first weekend, July 21–23, Karen Sherman and Leah Nelson/Abstraktions perform; the second weekend, July 28–30, Live Action Set appears with the BodyCartography Project.

Every year, the participants are chosen by Jeff Bartlett, the Southern’s artistic director; Philip Bither, the Walker’s performing arts senior curator; and one outside panelist—this year, Kristin Van Loon, a dancer/choreographer with Hijack. Says Bither, “Momentum gives a producing opportunity to contemporary dance-makers that we think are exciting.” The awards are coveted, and the performances themselves are eagerly awaited and widely discussed within the dance community. For three-year-old Live Action Set, Momentum is a big step forward.

Since receiving the commission, the Set has been figuring out what to create. In the proposal for Momentum, the company members weren’t very specific: They knew only that they wanted to work with the live music of the Spaghetti Western String Co., a string quartet Treuer met while working as a baker at The Wedge Co-op. But Bither isn’t worried. “The series is intended to allow artists to take some chances,” he says. “The Set holds really great promise.”

In earlier rehearsals, the Set brainstormed some basic themes that interested them—revenge, the death penalty, society’s ideas of normalcy. Then they followed up intuition with research. The Southern’s antique brick walls made Treuer think of a well. This led him to the idea of salt mining, so he read the book Salt, by Mark Kurlansky. The death penalty led the group to unusual punishments, which Odell followed up by researching revenge and punishment around the world. The show’s title, The Percussionist, was Odell’s idea. She liked the specificity of referring to a single individual and playing on the fact that Spaghetti Western doesn’t have a percussionist.

Though these elements aren’t related, the foursome is confident they will come together. Improvisation will help the dancers turn their ideas into movement, and, eventually, they’ll pull together a show—a rich, funny, and sad human story told through powerful movement, commonplace speech, and dramatic images. “We trust that our research will reveal why our intuitions led us there in the first place,” says Odell. “What I’ve found intriguing in their work,” says Bither, “is that there’s a kind of surreal logic, a sense that anything could happen.”

How does the Set know it will work? Because they’ve done it before and had remarkable success. Their last production, Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, a complex story about life in a war zone, which premiered at the 2005 Fringe Festival and had an encore run at the Loring Playhouse, received best-of awards from both City Pages and the Star Tribune. 

In 2002, after a year at the Dell’arte School of Physical Theatre in California, Noah Bremer returned to Minnesota, where he’d graduated from the University of Minnesota’s theater program. Through the network of Twin Cities performers, he met Galen Treuer and Vanessa Voskuil. Both Treuer, known for his athletic dancing, and Voskuil, for her natural movement and poetic choreography, wanted to experiment with more theatrical performance styles. Along with Natasha Hassett (who later quit working with the group to concentrate on her band and Catalyst Dances), the three created Taking Up the Slack, a show for an alt-theater series that ran in late 2002.

Megan Odell, a performer who’s equally at ease acting and dancing, was in the audience. She wasn’t in need of work, but she says what she saw them perform that night was everything she’d been looking for—”theatrical, movement-based, funny, touching, honest, absurd.” Afterward, Odell discussed the show with Bremer, suggested expanding it for the Fringe, and said she’d like to be involved in any of their future projects.

Odell’s enthusiasm encouraged Bremer and the others to continue working together—and when they did, Bremer called Odell. In 2003, the group expanded the show into Exposure, which they performed at that year’s Fringe Festival. One thing led to another, and the four soon found themselves creating a show for the 2004 Fringe.

Also in 2004, the group chose its name. Treuer wanted a succinct name to describe his artistic activity. “Dancer” didn’t fit, since Treuer found himself doing more than dancing onstage; he spoke, acted, clowned, and mimed. He decided the common element was live performance—his body moving in front of the audience—and he came up with “Live Action Artist.” It wasn’t long before he and the others realized that the phrase particularly applied to their collaboration and expanded the name to “Live Action Set.” Jon Ferguson, who directed the Set (and others) in Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, says that when he first saw the Set perform, he noticed “their ability to create really beautiful and quirky vignettes.” But it was their movement that caught his eye. “When they danced, I thought, ‘OK, that’s what they do. Ah, they’re really good at that.’ They’re incredible movers,” he says.

The Set’s name also reflects the members’ refusal to erect boundaries between different types of performance. They don’t want to limit their choices or ignore any of their many interests, which include mythology, Chinese medicine, capoeira, and clown technique. Beyond collaborating with each other and Ferguson, they’ve also worked with playwright Abi Basch, musician Rebecca Disrud, architect Dan Verycrusse, and others. The Set has danced, acted, sung, hung from the ceiling, stumbled like zombies, clowned, and even been absent. They’ve performed in the round, on a frozen lake, in a lobby, and outside Barbette.

 What holds this diverse practice together? The Set’s ability to convey emotion through movement. People remember Live Action Set performances the way they remember favorite personal moments. Even critics have responded to the Set with warm, almost uncritical approval. At Please Don’t Blow Up Mr. Boban, the Set’s most widely seen work, Odell recalls, “[audience members] had tears in their eyes and hands clamped over their mouths.” Bremer tells of a woman who seemed unhappy at the end of the performance, but wouldn’t look him in the eye. “I realized she was avoiding my eye contact because she was holding back tears,” he says.

Creating moving work together isn’t an easy process. “The hardest thing?” asks Odell. “Working around all of our busy schedules—work, other rehearsals and performances and tours, personal lives.” Odell’s in the midst of buying a house and finishing a degree in Chinese medicine so she can start her own practice. Treuer, also wrestling with his nondance career, would like to go back to school. Voskuil juggles many performance commitments and her own creative work. Bremer’s day job—working at Pillsbury House Theatre—leaves him tired. All agree it’s hard to find the time and energy to be creative.

It also isn’t easy for four strong personalities, all artists in their own right, to create work together. All four need to feel involved in an idea for it to work. “I think it’s a fairly angst-ridden process,” says Bither. But, there’s no shouting or screaming. They’re too invested in the Set for that. “We’re sort of like an intimate relationship times two,” Odell says. “[We’re] still in the beginnings of working out how to work together artistically and administratively,” says Voskuil. Quick-witted Treuer inspires the others; Voskuil is alternately visionary and practical, the group’s philosopher and, for The Percussionist, choreographer; and Odell, calm and open-minded, connects everyone’s ideas. Bremer, often the quietest of the four, seems an odd choice as leader until you see them working together. Bremer structures rehearsals, orders discussion, and gives suggestions that galvanize the others. Bremer’s the linchpin: If he’s excited by what the Set is doing, the others will follow him.

In fact, Bremer’s so devoted to the Set that he’s stenciled the group’s name on his fifteen-year-old white Lincoln Town Car, which sometimes appears in the Set’s performances. “It takes a lot of time and energy to continue the momentum we have going,” he says. “[It’s hard to fight] through the exhaustion to create the work, to propel the organization. But I am so proud of the work we’ve created and that [it] has such a profound effect on the audiences.”

For the future, the Set has as many plans as it has fingers. They’d like to ensure their survival by creating a long-term strategy for the company. They’re also interested in conducting residencies and in touring. And then there’s a trip to South America to study with the clowning company Lume. But, in the meantime, there’s The Percussionist.

Back to rehearsal. “So the vision was,” begins Bremer, setting up an exercise for Odell and Treuer. Odell is instructed to mime building a sand castle at the beach—digging the moat, molding towers, dribbling wet sand on top of walls. Treuer is doing push-ups and yoga. “Whatever really works, works,” Bremer says as they improvise. “These are my favorite moments,” says Voskuil, “because you never know what you are going to get.” 

Lightsey Darst is dance columnist for Mpls.St.Paul Magazine.