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.