When “The Exorcist” first came out in theaters, people had to leave the building midway through the film. Like a modern-day horror flick, some members of a test audience couldn’t stay through the beginning of “Phalanx.”
“Phalanx” is senior dance major Aaron Hooper’s senior honors thesis show that opens Friday. What elevates the piece from being simply entertainment are its moments of beauty, Hooper said. Without these, he said the performance is unbelievable and ineffective.
“I think it shows truth,” Hooper said. “If I tried to portray just the ugliness, people would look away and say, ‘Oh, that was a show. That was created, not the real world.’ So if you take all this ugly stuff and tie it together with a sense of beauty, people start to respond to that as reality.”
Hooper is the choreographer, writer and director of this show, which he said is named after a Spartan war formation, an impenetrable mass of shields and spears. The modern-day phalanx is the wall people use to hide from issues such as genocide, he said.
“We’re playing with genocide in a few different aspects — emotional, physical, spiritual and religious genocides instead of just destroying a community,” he said.
Hooper said he was inspired to do a show about different forms of genocide after a series of suicides by boys who were bullied over the past couple years. Since then, he said the concept grew to be based on “big business” and how the government breaks down individual and clan identities.
“When I look at genocide, it can be an emotional destruction of a people,” he said. “What I was thinking of in my paper and everything is how can we analyze these major genocides that happen that I’m showcasing here, and see the similarities to what is happening in our own country.”
Vladimir Conde Reche, Hooper’s faculty supervisor, said the performance expresses the concept abstractly through dance and realistically through video projections. For example, the show has video clips and dance interpretations of moments in history such as the Buddhist monk in Vietnam setting himself on fire in the ‘60s. He said the subject matter directly engages the audience.
We see that every day in the news, but it’s different to see it in the news on a two-dimensional screen versus onstage in a three-dimensional setting, he said.
The seats in the audience are not bolted to the floor, so Hooper had every other seat removed, so attendees have nobody to sit next to. The choreography is set primarily to Pink Floyd tracks, and as soon as the audience enters, they become emotionally involved in the performance. He said he’s had a few test audiences, a few members of which left because it was uncomfortable.
The purpose of creating this in this intimate space is to make the people in the audience feel a sense of isolation and to feel almost as uncomfortable as the person that is being discriminated against, Hooper said.
“Phalanx”
by Aaron Hooper
Carlisle Gym
Friday, Saturday 7 p.m.
Sunday, 2 p.m.
Admission by donation
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