Rochester Fringe Festival, Day 5: "BeeEye," "The Dust" reviews

“The honeybee reminds us of the interconnectedness of all
life” begins the provided statement by Cat Ashworth, creator of the “BeeEye” video installation at Gallery r, part of the
inaugural Rochester Fringe Festival. Six panel screens at a comfortable eye-height
form a hexagon. A viewer can stand at the center and learn a bit about
honeybees, and hear the words of people who lovingly keep them, while being
mesmerized by beautiful video of the fuzzy little wonders and their constant,
high-frequency droning.

The reverence for the bees’ work is evident, and one keeper speaks
of ego-less dedication to community as the insects create everything they need
as a model humans should follow. Though there is a cruelty in the hive, as in
all nature, which the speaker does not mention. Keepers tend the hive panels in
shorts and t-shirts (another scene shows a calm older man entirely covered in a
swarm), comfortable and barely interfering, some teaching small children (who
are fully geared up in coveralls) to be comfortable with the bees rather than
mindlessly fearing them.

One scene in the video reveals the discovery of a dead hive. Though
full of honey, the speaker supposes that they died of “being queenless” and hints at Colony Collapse Disorder, which
another speaker renames “people collapse disorder,” making it clear that we are
not innocent in this mess. Survival favors the “most symbiotic,” the keeper says — the ones that don’t destroy the
environment and the other creatures they themselves rely upon.

Sunday evening, Core Project Chicago performed its work “The
Dust” at RAPA, combining dance, experimental music, and poetry to explore
the themes of death, fate, memory, and man. Four dancers worked through a
series of segments together or solo, conveying our old friend, the human
condition, through an elegant blend of bodies in motion and spoken word. The
group’s concern is with man’s aching struggle with his awareness — both a gift
and a curse — of his insurmountable transience.

This awareness has shaped everything about humanity, every
act and mode of being is born of this knowledge. Perhaps there is no better
method of conveying this beautiful tragedy than through dance, through a
performance piece. It is to be experienced in the moment, and documentation of
it falls dramatically short of the real deal.

“The Dust” explores our rational struggle with existence in
all of its desperate beauty, often pairing aspects that seem at odds: our
constructed existences and the illusion of free will, our flirtations with the
abyss and the crucial alliances that keep us here, our frenzied hunt for peace.
We are the stars and the void between them, and we crawl, leap, hang limp,
gather, and cavort through our cycles. At the end of one fever-pitch symphony of
sound and spinning, the dancers rest flat out, star-shaped, just for a moment
before rising to begin again.

The soundtrack of dissonant, static-filled electronic tonal music, hinted at background noise from the universe, often
overlaid with heartbeats, or with the presence of the artful human mind — the
philosophic soliloquy of a solo violin, or whispered poetic chants. Amid the
latter it was possible to detect uncertainty, longing, or defiance, and often,
an emotionless, practical look at our dust-in-the-wind nature. As a recorded
voice recited in the show, “Chaos is the natural state of being,
dying is nothing more than increased entropy. Nothing is ever created or
destroyed.”