Fathom

Amy Jensen is a storyteller. By which I mean I see her doing exactly the same sort of thing with her ancestral Danish stories as I’m doing with my ancestral Karuk ones. At its most basic state, traditional storytelling is sitting around the fireplace or kitchen table telling tales of yore. But Jensen isn’t just a storyteller – she’s also a dramaturg. And an artist who is both of those things will bring a whole portfolio of theatrical tools to the old stories augmenting them, making them come alive.

Jensen’s work-in-progress Fathom is her telling of Hans Christian Andersen’s Wild Swans. Like any good teller of folk-tales, she uses the story not as a literal script, but as a guideline to which she can bring herself into the story, and the story into herself. And she does this quite literally. She weaves Wild Swans together with her own experiences with loss and depression, and with beautiful oral imagery of a museum exhibit filled with all kinds of weights and measures. Her storytelling also incorporates the choreography and dance of Heather Heiner and the composition and percussion of Levy Lorenzo. But the crux of Fathom is the juxtaposition of Wild Swans with Jensen’s deeply personal experiences. At times, this crux threatens to overwhelm the dance and music, and it’s not until Jensen steps back, or else incorporates herself into the choreography, that those other elements are able to come to the fore.

On the other hand, Fathom is yearning to become an immersive piece of performance. From the dance and music, to Jensen’s evocative oral descriptions of the setting, to her and Heiner’s bringing suds in their hands to incorporate the sense of smell, this piece is bursting at the seams, ready to explode into a quietly passionate experience. But for this to happen, it seems to me that the choreography, music, and set will have to flourish in the same way the storytelling already is.