The Brooklyn Rail

On a bitter night in Brooklyn, two women stand on Third Avenue at Sixth Street, squinting up at a street sign. “Looking for Kestrel’s?” asks someone out of nowhere, as if a dance performance at Katie Workum’s studio is the only logical destination in this industrial stretch of the Gowanus Canal. I take it as a sign we’ve wandered into—no, we’re being led into—a kind of David Lynchian Twin Peaks otherworldliness, complete with confusion about which door to enter. Monster Mourning is a delightfully unhinged-in-the-best-way evening of movement, music, and storytelling created by Workum and Weena Pauly.

There’s even a mysterious curtained passage (is it velvet?) to further intrigue a good Lynch fan. In cinematic fashion, the correct door reveals a lobby glowing with living-room cocktail-party energy where we wait for the house to open: a wide dance studio, decorated with tree branches that appear to break through corners of the tile ceiling like roots that clog plumbing, and piles of discarded blankets. On one side a music station, with composer Annie Hart at the helm—a real life Twin Peaks alum from when she played with the trio, Au Revoir Simone—decked out with vibraphone, melodica, various percussion instruments, electronic keyboard, and reverb loop pedal. The audience files in to take seats in two long rows of folding chairs.

Into this space gallops a performer, cutting a coltish loop around the perimeter before exiting, followed by a second woman doing the same. To be honest, I don’t yet know that it’s two women alternating their entrances—they look so much alike—delivering high kicks that land in a lunge, flicking their hair, dressed in black outfits that remind me of gym suits required in 1960s high school. The costumes feature a kind of DIY ruffle stitched between the shoulders to resemble a horse’s mane. Heavy black sneakers clomp like hooves against the floor. After much of this, the two settle, head-to-head on the ground, nuzzling horses, their hair draped over their faces, then banded into a single shared ponytail. When they rise for a step-tap combo, they are twins joined at the cranium. A song arises relating how for twenty-nine years people of a village shuffled, until in the thirtieth year the women of the village said “enough.” Their constant shuffling had worn them down and they discovered too late they were unable to open their legs to “flark” and thus no babies were born and the villagers died off one by one “due to the lack of a simple routine of daily stretching.” I am already enthralled. An allegory about the drudgery of women’s domestic work! I can feel people around me holding their breath—did she really say “flarking?”—when the story turns to birds taking up the flarking and making hundreds of bird babies. Suddenly a bone chilling screech releases an explosion of wing flapping bird orgy chaos, with the performers whipping blankets about, slapping them onto the floor like wet laundry, and humping a great fabric pile in an unabashed extended frenzy of flarking. It’s the best depiction of aviary madness since Hitchcock’s The Birds—without harming so much as an actual feather.

Pauly raises her head from the swirling, manic action, and with a look of chagrin addresses the audience, “Thank you for being here.” She launches into a scattered tale of what happened when she left the show the previous night, a monologue that dissolves into gibberish so seamlessly I am still straining to make out details before I realize I’m not intended to understand. Workum rises in a cloud of spent blankets and shuffles out of the room with Pauly in her wake to pick up a dropped blanket or two. I happen to glance over at Hart behind the music station—she’s leaning back in her chair, knitting. This is only part one of Monster Mourning.

Where one might expect an intermission, Workum and Pauly send out a duo of young girls dressed in matching blue skirts and white blouses to offer the audience wrapped candies from a basket. “Werther’s?” they asked each of us, advancing one by one down the full two rows of chairs, earnest as missionary children going door to door.

When Workum and Pauly return, they’re wearing matching turquoise checkerboard leotards, bare legs, and butterfly sleeves. They launch into a silly song sung in rounds while braiding their hair, their voices angelic with harmony. Arm in arm, they are a matched set of Hummel figurines come to life. As they sing, they strike up a body rhythm, clapping their hands and thighs, then each other’s thighs—a game that escalates to a full out slap fight. One of the song lyrics is “we are travelers from another space and time,” and indeed this skit takes me back to my own past when I can imagine clowning around in the innocent way that kids sometimes take too far. In Workum and Pauly’s joint artist bio, they claim twenty-five years of friendship and professional partnership, making 857 dances in the process. Their dance vocabulary is simple and bold, as if sketched with a wide magic marker: heightened pedestrian locomotion without decoration, weighted and earthbound, with an occasional cartwheel or handstand for extra velocity. One suspects these women are more at home wielding a rock-climbing spike than rising into piqué arabesque, yet I have no doubt they could do both well if compelled.

For costume change number three (there are no official section breaks, but the show seemed to coalesce around three song/story cycles) the women change onstage from the checkerboard costumes into their version of a little black dress: black shorts, shirts, and sneakers. They drag out the pile of blankets, now smoothed and stacked, and begin a lengthy ritual of laying out a single blanket one at a time, folding the sides and tucking under the ends, until all the blankets fan into a wide semi-circle of casket shaped rectangles. Are they death shrouds? A gathering of ancestors? The past, indexed and archived for reference?

Once arranged, Workum and Pauly skip between the blankets in a risky game of hopscotch: any misstep could result in a nasty slip-and-fall. Pauly takes a running leap into Workum’s arms, latches her legs around Workum’s waist, and clings for dear life in a spot-on depiction of a needy friend. Workum shrugs her shoulders to the audience as if to say, What’s a girl to do? She looks to Hart for some kind of musical cue, but Hart’s knitting again. The two women fall to the floor, wrestling and swatting at each other until they lay splayed out, their chests rising and falling from the effort.

The evening ends with the telling of a violent fairytale in which a peasant’s toes are eaten by a pig. The women take turns to pile on one fantastical story element after another, riffing to see who can describe the gore in more outrageous detail. The tone then turns sober for a final acapella song that reveals the source of the show title, “we are monsters mourning.” I write down some snippets: “We are walking step by step into the future, past and present;” “we are doing the labor that we all must do,” (listing a variety of domestic chores involving dusty windows and bedsheets); “we are monsters and we die.”

It takes a minute before I can walk straight when I stand to leave—as if the energy, humor, and physical endurance of the show have bypassed my conscious understanding to settle directly in my gut. Is this joy? Or maybe profound relief, after spending ninety minutes in an imaginary kingdom to distract me from terrible world events. Either way, I am uplifted by the unbounded creativity of this trio of artists who, in a perfect universe, would have greater resources directed their way. Back outside, the night doesn’t seem quite as cold.