We’re definitely not in Kansas anymore
BODYART makes its New Orleans debut with hymn + them, a contemporary dance work that uses Dorothy’s famous journey to Oz as a lens to investigate the identity of today’s American woman.
Immediately pulling us into Oz, the audience is individually escorted into a space covered in
astroturf and littered with poppies. Lit by peppered house lamps, it’s a contained collision of
living room nostalgia and surreal dreamlands. Part autobiography, part fantasy, Artistic Director Leslie Scott’s movement collages both rearrange reality and deconstruct nostalgia, to not only reflect
Dorothy’s identity as a Midwestern woman, but also find contrast and similarities to identities
elsewhere.
With the backdrop of our current political climate ever present, this project looks at woman's role
in American society and her desire to escape, to find belonging, and discover a collage of
contrasting identities. hymn + them is about the joys of going away, of leaving the grayness and
entering the color. Over the Rainbow is, or ought to be, the anthem for all of us who search for
the place where dreams really do come true. Listen to the yearning in Judy Garland’s voice as
her face tilts up toward the skies, singing about a place where skies are blue. What she
embodies with the purity of an archetype, is the human dream of leaving: “a celebration of
escape, a grand paean to the uprooted self, a hymn—the hymn—to Elsewhere (Rushdie).”
