About Vanishing Point

Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, New York (2018)

As part of the City/Dans series, Danspace Project presented the premiere of Tom Pearson and Zach Morris’ evening-length contemporary dance work, Vanishing Point. Wickedly funny and suddenly somber, Vanishing Point fused aggressive, exhaustive movement, meditative nuance, and live music by the alt-bluegrass ensemble The Dang-it Bobbys, led by composer Kris Bauman. The show garnered two 2008 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards, one for composer Kris Bauman and one for choreographers Tom Pearson and Zach Morris.

Vanishing Point engaged St. Mark’s Church both as a sanctuary and an architectural structure evocative of the columns and porticos of the rural south. Fully self-aware and handled with equal measures of sincerity and irreverence, the performance unfolded as a fictional funeral (replete with inappropriate eulogies and talk about sex in church). Ricocheting backward and forward through time in a nonlinear, photo album fashion, Vanishing Point shotgunned from elusive impression to indelible imprint, skipping decades, unearthing fragments of a hidden past, and obsessively replaying events in an attempt to articulate meaning out of fractured moments.

Culled from the artists’ collective stories, Vanishing Point was an exploration of family legacies that had been shrouded in secrets, blurred by liquor, or — in some cases — composed of outright lies. A confluence of slipping memories, improbable tales, and faulty recollections, the work lived in the blurry spaces between truth and fabrication.