Melancholy

This chamber theater piece comes off like a wonderful European film, with light farce juxtaposed by doleful expressions of melancholy, along with a cellist ...

Lacie Scott, who also danced with RDT during Brown’s tenure at the company, has a daughter and two sons and enjoys dancing and teaching when she can secure a babysitter. A mother of twin daughters, Laycee Barnett, a Southern Utah University graduate, has been a company member with Kinuko Modern Dance Company, Myriad Dance Company, Wasatch Contemporary Dance Company and currently Creators Dance Project. “Dancing women who choose motherhood engage in the ultimate act of improvisation and creation to balance both aspects of life, one that facilitates new levels of richness and understanding,” she wrote. The movement juxtaposed feelings of youthful playfulness as well as subtle melancholy, occasionally punctuated with dancing swirls and twists. For more information, see the “Motherhood and dance inform each other in ways that enrich and deepen the quality of both aspects of life and broaden a woman as an artist, creator, educator, teacher, and human being.” Moving away from the Protestant belief that an individual’s conscience and melancholy were one and the same, influential volumes such as Robert Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, published in 1635, argued that conscience and melancholy were not one and the same. The farcical and absurd dimensions nevertheless do not occlude the metaphorical substance of the play’s epiphany. Pleasantly, at the play’s end, the reuniting of the twins who were separated becomes its own solution to melancholy. Ruhl, one of the country’s best-known playwrights, wrote three plays within a two-year period (Eurydice, The Clean House and Melancholy Play), with melancholy as the thematic anchor. In a very smart, gratifying interpretation, the cast for this production valorized this rich, soul-inspired ode to melancholy. The other characters are attracted to Tilly because they enjoy the emotions of melancholic yearning.