The apocalypse is hard to avoid, both literally and figuratively. "Fear has brought us together. That's the magic of Xmas" says Fry in Futurama's 2001 Christmas episode, "A Tale of Two Santas." Oddly enough, a similar sentiment seems to echo throughout Moving People Dance's Once Upon a Snowfall .---
Following in the footsteps of Moving People's 10-years-running Swingin' Suites , Once Upon a Snowfall emerged to fill the holiday season with up-tempo dance theater.
I say up-tempo in the sense that the vignettes—from a Mexican wedding to a Dave Brubeck Quartet's "Take Five" train station reunion to a vintage Swingin' Suites cameo—are lively, colorful and dynamic. They aren't, however, particularly uplifting.
Set in a post-apocalyptic junkyard constructed of various pieces of donated detritus and a few strategically placed CRT televisions, the show opens with a mob of orphans sorting trash to earn their keep from the cruel and cross-dressing overseer, Villana (Charles Gamble) . In this stark future, the narrator, DJ, or Don John (Ryan Kochevar) , tells us, there is no snow.
Villana is a problem. This female character, played by a man, borders on offensively overdone. When, during the opening scene, she first appears as a disembodied face on the televisions, and scolds the dancing children, she comes off as absurd. As the story develops and we come to understand that Villana fills a genuine and serious niche in the story, questions arise about why we should care.
The plot tries to evoke Charles Dickens' quintessential Christmas hallmark, A Christmas Carol . An overarching meta-story of exploring the Christmases of youth ties together the otherwise disjointed dance vignettes. Pursued by Villana, DJ leads one of the orphans, Quinn Puddlebutt (Elvis Parker Jones) , through a magic door, and shows him what Christmas was like before global warming took a toll on the annual snowfall.
Unfortunately, that's where the similarities to the Dickens classic end. The individual scenes—such as a disorderly, Stomp-esque romp in a soup kitchen—border on contrivances that don't flow organically from concept to execution. The aforementioned "Take Five" train station scene makes smart use of space and props, and the choreography is top-notch yet, in terms of plot development, the scene is superfluous.
The unifying element of each dance is DJ and Villana who (spoiler alert!) meet in their youth as art school students, fall in love and marry. Different Moving People performers and students, identified only by DJ's red cap and Villana's red garment trim, play the two leads in each scene. The color markers, while underplayed, serve the concept well, allowing the performers to portray the two lovers at various ages and times of their lives.
Unfortunately, this tool also further emphasizes the awkward casting for the grown-up Villana. When adult Villana wanders into young Villana performing in Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker, the contrast between the graceful, female dancer and the cross-dressing male taskmistress is rhetorically stuffed down the audience's throat. What should be the performance's biggest revelatory moment is tarnished by a nagging question: Why?
This is the issue throughout. The performance has some clever moments, and the choreography, when good, is extremely good. Overall though, the production struggles with doing too much . During the intermission, one couple I spoke to remarked that the junkyard set was exquisite and seemed to have taken more production time than the rest of the show. Tack on an inter-audience chase scene—which wove around the sides and back of the auditorium, was difficult to follow and went on for far too long—and Snowfall feels gimmicky.
The story is dark (and very un-Christmasy, which isn't itself a bad thing), and the redemption at the end isn't the Dickens-esque redemption one might expect. Staying progressive and moving forward from Swingin' Suites are appreciable impulses but, hopefully, next year, Moving People hones in a bit more on what the heart of the show really is.
