Liz Gerring Horizon Analysis

At first glance, Liz Gerring’s hour-long work, Horizon, seems to be utter chaos. Everything about the piece appears to be in a random disarray. The costumes are clash of colors, textures, and patterns; the dancing is a simultaneous layering of unrelated dance phrases; the music is primarily distorted sounds and noise. Yet, despite the overall discord of the piece, it is still comprehendible — which is exactly Gerring’s intention. Horizon experiments with how many different elements could be incorporated in a piece without it dissolving into complete pandemonium. Gerring explores this idea in all aspects of the piece, but particularly with the relationship between dancing and music. Gerring utilizes a disjointed, abstract and diverse score to
Horizon acknowledges the sound, but doesn't follow it. The piece’s original score, composed by Michael J. Schumacher, has three distinct components — silence, distorted white noise, and 80’s-like techno music. The majority of the score is the manipulated sounds, such as a tea-kettle whisting, a muffled car engine, or doctored monophonic chanting. Gerring’s choreography does not follow the pulse or tempo of the music, primarily because the majority of the score has no pulse. Even in the one section of techno music that does have a definitive pulse, the choreography still does not exactly line up with it. When the techno music begins, a single dancer breaks the whirlwind of movement and noise on stage with a simple series of ball-changes and chest thrusts but the dancer’s beat is frustratingly non-committal. Besides for the ball changes during the techno music, the music has no other notable landmarks for the choreography. Any moments where the music and dancing line up seem to be happy coincidences. Gerring’s choreography is rhythmically independent of the music in order to emphasize the discord of the whole