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Art is created as a reaction to the world, and exhibiting that work shares the artist’s perception to inspire conversation. The Selah Dance Collective, in conjunction with Nebula Dance Lab, presented Endgame, a contemporary dance showcase offering a broad range of reactions to art and politics: from choreographer Ashley McQueen’s “Plunge the Swamp,” a memorable commentary on Trump’s tendency toward diarrhea of the mouth, to “Endgame,” choreographed by Selah’s founder, Meredith Cabaniss, a piece inspired by the Samuel Beckett play of the same name (as well as the 1913 Armory art show in New York City that shocked the art world with unfamiliar techniques of exhibiting the human form). Endgame explored a world in which representational movement flows in and out of expected meaning and paired concepts and moods with unconventional counterparts.

Conceptually interesting but, by design, varyingly inaccessible, Endgame featured a variety of contemporary pieces by choreographers Cabaniss, McQueen, Taylor Fisher, and Wilson Vu. An ambitious collection of work by talented dancers and choreographers, Endgame explored the balance between reality and societally constructed and perpetuated fictions. The concept of basing art on inspiration from other art suggests a captivating layering of concepts — Beckett’s Endgame is an absurdist view of the end of humanity — but such a broad creative stimulus left Endgame without blatant manifestation of theme. However, the conversation that Selah presented through this work is vital, and despite a consistent viewpoint, audiences learned that some art — especially art that is representational of a reaction to other art — can be a continuous conversation that constantly evolves with social perception.

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