Young choreographer has audiences whooping out loud
The music starts high and thrilling. Quick electronic arpeggios evolve and repeat. The dancers drop, rise, pump a fist in the air, spin, skip, lean back, repeat. Each woman’s movement is a little offset from the others, filling the stage with sharp cascades of gesture and whirling yellow skirts.
They finally unite in a slow rotation, torso toward cocked foot, then on around til they’re facing away from us, palms out, hands like splayed stars. Then they uncoil, stand up straight, pull one stiff arm across their necks in a clear “cut your throat” gesture, and throw it away behind them. The music drops: power-ballad guitar and drums. We’re off.
The scene is Celebrations community performance at Spot Venue; the dance is choreographer Emma M. Pannkuk’s “The Road Out”. Just turned 23, Pannkuk is young even among emerging artists. An alumna of Ballet Tennessee and The Pop-Up Project, Pannkuk is now a freelance choreographer, teacher, and dancer, spending a portion of her time with CCS as a ballroom dance instructor, but mostly working independently to bring her work to venues around the city.
As a dancer, Pannkuk is a powerful, vibrant presence, bringing an engaging sweetness to the stage, but then again, Chattanooga’s bursting at the seams with skilled dancers. Where Pannkuk makes her mark with is with choreography that’s a powerful mix of dance and gesture, endowed with explosive energy even when exploring very dark themes—think end-of-the-world dark.
Among her most memorable works are “The Road Out”, “Shake that Devil” for the Color Carnival, and “White Horse” for Ballet Tennessee’s Spring Festival of Dance in 2017. With the eerie “White “Horse”, Pannkuk combined two Johnny Cash songs, “Hurt” and “When the Man Comes Around” to explore the hardship of endings.
“It was about the end of the world, and explored what that might feel like, moving from ‘What have I experienced?’ and ‘What has left its mark on me?’ moving into ‘What am I left with?’” she says.
Pannkuk locates her work within contemporary dance. “I have such a heart for ballet,” she says. “I really enjoy those lines and the very classical positions, but I also like weird shapes and experimenting into lots of gestures and bigger movements.”
Her work is often grounded in an issue or story. “I’ll either get some sort of insight on a particular issue or I’ll speak with someone and think: ‘That would be a great opportunity for storytelling,’” she says. “I don’t shy away from telling the story or communicating the emotion as transparently as possible.” Sometimes even a single word will inspire her.
She’s bold in her music choices, favoring country, folk, and alternative rock. She’s choreographed three pieces so far to Radiohead songs, and she’s fascinated with Imogene Heap and Bon Iver.
Among Chattanooga choreographers, Pannkuk’s work fits most closely with that of Bernadette Upton of WEAVE. They share the blending of gesture with full-body dance, the musicality, and the exploration of working-class and apocalyptic themes.
Chattanooga is still too small to have a distinctive dance style. But as we develop one, it’s sure to be informed by choreographers like Pannkuk—athletic, colloquial without being slangy, ice-pure as Red Clay spring water, and deeply involved with moral themes.
Back to “The Road Out”. After the first lines of “Teenage Wasteland” blare out (“Out here in the fields/I fight for my meals/I get my back into my living”), the dancers drop, too, alternating lunges like runners on blocks, then leaping like stags before forming a tight triangle. They split again to fill the stage with a blur of energy held together by the crispness of line and gesture. The knife-hand-to-throat becomes a panicky reverberation.
This dance is fast and a lot of it’s hard—like a flying T that rotates and resolves into a high front attitude. Some of the dancers wobble in their attempts, but the choreographer’s purpose holds firm. As the song resolves into a fiddle break, the dancers line up into a stiff-legged parody of folk dance, skipping, bowing, both hands to throat now as if to contain the welled-up emotion. Lunges and stag leaps repeat double time as the fiddle goes wild.
Then everyone’s running and we don’t know what force is going to win—defiant energy or frenetic despair—and it’s with a whoop of relief and shared triumph that the audience greets the last pose, everyone screeching to a halt with their fists in the air.