The Repertoire

From 1999 through 2003, Carol Langstaff and FLOCK Dance Troupe have been creating a linked series of productions celebrating the imagery of Earth, Air, Fire, and Water. While related by their creative process and by a shared vocabulary of striking natural imagery, these works exist independently. All showcase Carol's clear and powerful choreography, drawing upon Martha Graham's modernist spirals and contractions, traditional folk dances, movements of physical work, nonverbal body language, and flow-forms derived from nature. Audiencs are shown complications and confrontations, yet ultimately these conflicts are transformed through humor, visual beauty, and ecstatic ensemble dances.

ELEMENTAL
This piece addresses consumerism and the wasting of nature's bounty in contrast with pastoral, agrarian ways of living.

OPPORTUNITY CALLS
Inspired by the paintings of Gustav Klimt, this work shows the demise of family and community life as we turn away from nature through ever more high-speed growth and technological development.

JOY
Dedicated to the arts of living and dying well, and to the possibility of wonder in death as well as life, this piece enacts a series of deaths "translated" by the elements, climaxing in a vision of universal recurrence.

GO! MOVE! SHIFT!
This piece explores the movements of refugees and the displacement of traditional peoples and cultures brought about by economic exploitation of resources and globalization.

REGENDER
This fifth production in the cycle builds upon the distinctive yet overlapping forms of masculine and feminine energy and follows the paths of these in the natural world and human society.

GRACE
Grace is in the form of a requiem for the loss of our natural world and its waters.

Fire: Feast of eaters who cannot be satisfied . . .

And we should consider any day lost when we have not danced at least once. And we should call every truth false that was not accompanied by at least one laugh."
- Friedrich Nietzsche, from Thus Spake Zarathrustra