Impossible Maps Questions Life and Grief Through Dance

Impossible Maps dancers in a lake

James Harnois / Courtesy of C. Asa Call

Impossible Maps, a dance concert choreographed by C. Asa Call and performed at Yaw Theater, explored the ever-agonizing experience of grief and how, despite its wretched terrain, it can and must be navigated. Under a mythic lens, it interwove expressions of humanity’s despair with the mourning of Earth’s seasonal cyclical deaths and its inevitable final destruction. 

Call expressed in a program note that, “Grief is a strange, unpredictable, and ineffable experience that drops you into an unknown landscape. You find your feet suddenly forming a path under you, and the path making you as you find your way.”

The choreography exemplified that uncertain navigation of grief as a parallel to the cartographic process of mapping the unknown planet, and it did so with beauty and unflinching authenticity. 

It began with an emergence. Dancers stepped from the shadowed wings in earth-colored dresses. One by one, they slipped through the holes of an elaborately designed, interconnected skirt, showing browns and blues and greens beneath the light. Bound together with the cloth, they built a mountainous shape with abstract lines and limb positions while an eerie voice listed words as building blocks for the imagination: “Rivers, dunes, fjords, canyons, sky, sky, sky…” It was a beautiful use of set elements, audio, and costuming to establish a unique and powerful visual. 

Then, like a dam, the image broke. Movement became a fitful, dynamic thing. Dancers performed atop, beneath, and within the sheer skirt, utilizing the many levels of the simplistic set which made a contained space feel limitless in its layers. 

From the chaos stemmed corruption and pain. The music distorted, their facial expressions contorted, mouths agape in agonized, silent screams. Dancers used heavy, rhythmic breathing to accentuate movement and establish a hyperventilation-like cadence to the piece. The choreography became a fusion of ritual and technique. Mysticism, narrative, and humanity shared through dance and subtle mimesis—a Joseph Campbell study in physical form, which seamlessly weaved together modern and balletic movement styles. 

While athletically and performatively impressive, the speed of the choreography often sacrificed the cleanliness of the piece. Parts of the performance benefitted from the visual asynchronicity, but others would have been stronger with a more grounded and unified approach, allowing the dancers to truly sink into the full extension of every movement and letting the imagery of it settle before sweeping into the next. 

In the second act, the mood of the choreography allowed a more sinister sensation to be explored. Haze machines polluted the atmosphere, and a character who portrayed a folkloric personification of rot—that soul-rending grief of both the earth and the body—entered the narrative. The character loomed in the background, costume stark and stunning in its elaborate features. With the swift sweep of her hands, crimson ribbons cascaded from beneath the dancer’s eyes, tears like flowing rivers of blood. Next, ribbons streamed from her outstretched wrists, and she stood a beautiful idol of despair. 

Dancers performing in Impossible Maps

Trisha French / Courtesy of C. Asa Call

Movement quality of the ensemble did not grow heavier immediately. It fell softly, laced with the knowledge and acceptance of the honed edge of pain which is necessary in rebirth. The music took on a fluttering quality, light strings and wind instruments with deep undertones of cello. Movement was both uplifted and grounded, balancing the two states alongside the music. Dancers pulled crimson ribbons from driftwood crafted trees (designed by Andy Snethen) across the performance space. Dancers wove through the outstretched ribbons, dipping beneath, leaning against, and utilizing the lines to create dynamic visuals.

Then came the initiation—the swift envelopment of heavy grief. Dancers were bestowed with pale veils and were made into ghostly forms by the sheer cloth and dim lighting which distorted the body’s lines. Resonant bass notes rang through the music, and movement turned misshapen, grotesque, and beautiful. Choreography utilized the floor and gravity to ground the visuals of the body and instill the weight of despair upon the audience. 

But the dancers did not succumb to that weight. Veils were expelled with laughter and ferality. They faced down the audience with the gasping breaths of attempted survival—then black out. Silence. A light cue like a death sentence. Peace at last. 

In an address to the audience prior to the performance, Call stated, “Dance is born and it dies in the moment of its creation.” For this reason, it proved the perfect medium to tell the emotional and mystic elements of the psychology of grief alongside its relation to the birth and death cycles of nature and Earth. As Call said in the program note, “The wonder and admiration we feel for others' courage and moral beauty, the astonishing perilousness and grandeur we feel from nature, the inexplicable, extraordinary impact of encounters with the mystical. Awe puts us into relationship with mortality, imbuing us with a profound sense of our smallness along with our vast connectedness, bringing us towards reverence for that which is beyond our scope but must still try to grasp.”

The piece proved a showcase of creative brilliance and talent. Call’s choreography embodied the mystic abstracts of nature and the inexplicable emotions of grief through movement and expressions of sound. Lighting by Ricardo Solis set the atmosphere and used saturate hues to paint the dancers’ bodies and enhance the beauty and pathos of the piece. Costuming designed by Call set the color tone well and allowed for atypical lines and visuals to be explored. Set pieces and props collaboratively created by Call and Andy Snethen brought a stagnant and closed space to greater levels. And the performers, Sara Caplan, Chloe Dylla, Rainbow Fletcher, Nicole Flores, Madeleine Gregor, Maisy Neill, Alana O. Rogers, and Devin Muñoz, brought incredible technique and raw emotion to the dance. 

As a whole, it exhibited the potential for dance to express the abstracts of human and natural existence where words and other mediums are insufficient, and it highlighted the unique capability of live performance to connect with and move an audience.