What Was Frankie in the Mood For?

             Before the show even started, I was immediately entranced by the fish swimming around in the middle of the stage when I went to see In the Mood for Frankie. However clear the meaning of live fish during performance could be, I managed to derive exponentially less meaning from the dancers themselves. As the show began, I immediately noted how the lone dancer was able to continuously stay on his toes throughout the entirety of his routine. This theme consisted as the others gradually came on stage, switching off one by one in the beginning. As the show progressed, I began to search for a common theme or sort of storyline that could be derived from the actions of the dancers when they were on stage either together or alone, but only managed to scrape meaning out of a few scenes. I saw the tale of a marriage from its heartfelt beginning to its extremely messy, drunken rage and sadness-filled end, along with the continued strife of the dancers as a result. Throughout all of this, the performers remained on the tips of their toes, leaving the most significant moment of the entire performance (to me) to be the one point where one of the dancers visibly came down to the flats of his feet for several seconds. It had more of an impact on me than any other part of the performance, regardless of whether it was intended or not.

               There were also scenes with continued outfit changes that assisted with setting the scenes that I found interesting, although at times I did find myself silently hoping that the dancers would keep at least some of their clothes on. The outfits ranged from gowns to layers of shirts on top of each other, allowing the performers to better fit their various roles within each scene. Along with these outfit changes, I felt it was an extremely strong creative decision to utilize the small nature of the stage to make exits at various places all around it, instead of using only one or two points. It allowed for a versatility that I felt contributed to the flow between scenes, making it so that two performers could leave the stage in opposite directions while the third was able to enter it all at the same time. This steady flow prevented any one transition from feeling too abrupt or choppy like a poorly done music mix.

               While I was unable to identify the meaning of every scene and motion, I found that it was an extremely delightful performance enhanced by the prowess of all three dancers whose mastery of ballet was beyond evident. This was so much so, that just like abstract art, the undecipherable scenes were able to evoke variants of raw emotion from me as the viewer. This was beyond appreciated, as it is rare these days to find a show that manages to provoke a sort of emotion with almost no context whatsoever.