“We get a lot of compliments on the way we use gesture in our work,” Liz Casebolt explains. As she speaks, she smiles broadly at the audience, waves, then clasps her hands together and draws them over one shoulder, as if preparing to slug a baseball. “Not because those gestures are incredibly dynamic,” she continues, shimmying her shoulders forward and swinging her arms behind her like a ski jumper, “but because we tend to reveal what they mean at the end of the dance.”
Beside her, Joel Smith has been following the same movement pattern. Now he chimes in: “We feel that even though our audiences enjoy coming to their own conclusions about what the work means,” he says, shaking his hands rapidly, “they’re still going to have that burning desire to know if they’re right.”
Welcome to O(h), the latest creation of Los Angeles-based dance-theater duo casebolt and smith. Since 2006, these two dance artists have been collaborating on shows that explode preconceptions about dance and expose the processes of questioning, negotiating, and meaning making that lead up to a performance. Tonight, Thursday, December 1, casebolt and smith bring O(h) to Santa Barbara’s Contemporary Arts Forum.