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AUDIENCE REVIEW: "CAKE" by Sydnie Mosley Dances

Company:
Sydnie Mosley Dances

Performance Date:
Sunday, 9 November 2014

Freeform Review:

Cake. Perhaps no other culinary dish triggers as much emotional response or represents the polarity of our culture than cake. Cake is the symbol of every birthday. Cake is the culminating dish at every graduation party, wedding or baby shower, and even a relief from the grief at a funeral. Yet it’s presence in daily vernacular and pop culture is where cake truly hides it’s many layers.

Sydnie Mosley’s first slice of Cake offered to us is not really an offering at all. Let’s just say she is an investigator examining the piece of cake Ike Turner viciously shoved in Anna Mae Bullock’s face in the diner scene of What’s Love Got to do With It? Because the cake is much more the final gesture of a collision from which you can’t turn your head away. It is the shimmering glow, paradox, beauty, pain, density, subtlety, richness, completeness, aloneness, yet satisfaction of being a woman.

Cake is the result of unseen hours of labor with equal amounts of love and loathing. Cake is a unifier. Yet cake is divided. Cake is the prize to be won. Yet the cake always sits in splendid isolation. Cake is waited on, yet can be consumed in seconds. Cake is pleasurable, yet too much is said to be bad for you. The icing on the cake comes in a myriad of flavors and colors. Yet it is always said its what’s inside that counts.

These are the endless layers that exist in Sydnie Mosely Dances' Cake. This first serving held many stories of personal and added ingredients from the retrospective to the satirical to the poignant. Yet the intention of this slice, I feel, was not to satisfy us. Rather, frustrate us with a piece, not quite large enough to fill us up, but leaving us wanting more next time. Indeed Mosley appears to be a master chef, and us, her blind yet eager test subjects.

Photo © SLMDances fan @anthoniaa