Loom Lab’s ‘Old Growth’ explores loss, grief and community through movement

Loom Lab got its start when Edahl was accepted into the Minnesota Fringe Festival a few weeks after the party. “It’s a lottery system,” Edahl said. “So for most artists, when you find out you got in, there’s a mad scramble to make the thing you could only vaguely imagine because you weren’t sure you would have a venue for it.”

Credit: Courtesy of Re Edahl

Credit: Courtesy of Re Edahl

Edahl reached out to O’Brien, and together they created “Persephone,” which Edahl described as an “everything mashup of devised theater, dance, film and spoken word about living with depression and mental illness.”

The two worked well together. “Toward the end of that process,” Edahl said, “we looked at each other and we were like, ‘Do you want to keep doing this?’”

After three seasons of creating work in Minneapolis, Edahl relocated to Philadelphia in 2019 to care for their mother, who was diagnosed with cancer. A couple of years later, still reeling a bit from the COVID-19 shutdown and grieving their mother’s death, Edahl said, “My partner and I realized that there wasn’t really anything tying us to Philadelphia any longer, but neither one of us was particularly eager to do another Minnesota winter. So we decided to give Atlanta a try.”

Credit: Photo by Alex Clark

Credit: Photo by Alex Clark

While the narrative arc of “Old Growth” reflects Edahl’s personal experience, they and O’Brien have tried to keep the story open to multiple interpretations.

“Wanderer leaves for whatever reason,” explained Edahl, “and while death is implied, the emotions and experiences going into this piece are coming from a lot of different people. So it might also be a move or a changing or shedding of one’s identity through some other type of transition.”

The piece also emerges from all of the work that O’Brien and Edahl continued to dream of but couldn’t make during the pandemic. The current iteration has been revised and expanded from a workshop version Loom Lab presented at Minnesota Fringe last year with performers from Atlanta and Minneapolis.

Edahl said they and O’Brien have developed a process that often begins with vividly detailed written descriptions of a situation or series of images. For example, “Old Growth” originated in an image of one person picking up a foot and dragging the entire stage along with it, as if they had been rooted into the ground.

“Then I go into the studio and play with embodying those descriptions physically,” Edahl continued. Based on how the movement feels in the moment of doing or in the moments after, Edahl goes back to O’Brien with ideas about the thoughts or emotions lurking beneath the surface of a vignette.

“It creates a constant feedback loop from text to movement and back again,” Edahl said.

Traces of the initial concept remain in the version of “Old Growth” that Loom Lab will perform at the Windmill. The roots connecting dancer and stage have become the social ties binding the ensemble together into a community at the end of Mourner’s journey and the forest into which Mourner is led by Wanderer in another guise.

Credit: Photo by Forrest Wasko

Credit: Photo by Forrest Wasko

Edahl and O’Brien have drawn upon a variety of art forms — including puppetry, song, acrobatics, the aerial arts and spoken word — to craft “Old Growth.” At the same time, they both remain fascinated by the storytelling possibilities of gesture, which Edahl defined as movement that falls somewhere in between pedestrian and high art. It is human motion that looks close enough to what we all do, all the time, and is immediately salient even to those in the audience who may be unfamiliar with dance.

“Whether you’re a dancer or not, we all have a relationship with this fleshy vessel, this meat sack that we all move around in,” Edahl said. “When your mirror neurons fire in response to observing someone else’s gesture, you literally feel in your body what’s happening on stage. By tapping into that, a director or choreographer can give someone a really visceral experience.”

Beyond Loom Lab, Edahl’s work in Atlanta includes participation in circus arts platform Crux Collective for the company’s debut and performing in Leo Briggs’ “The Abduction Project” in July 2024. Edahl also is part of the cast for several pieces in a repertory show that Meaghan Novoa is staging in March.

In the Atlanta debut of “Old Growth,” Loom Lab has an opportunity to harness Edahl’s careful attention to how multiple bodies exist in relation to one another in space and make new multidisciplinary performance art. It is yet another beginning for an artistic partnership that has weathered historical and personal sea change and now sends exploratory roots into new soil.

Dance Preview

Loom Lab: “Old Growth”

Through Sunday. 7:30 p.m. Friday through Sunday. $15-$40. Windmill Arts, 2823 Church St., East Point. windmillarts.org

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Robin Wharton studied dance at the School of American Ballet and the Pacific Northwest Ballet School. As an undergraduate at Tulane University in New Orleans, she was a member of the Newcomb Dance Company. In addition to a Bachelor of Arts in English from Tulane, Robin holds a law degree and a Ph.D. in English, both from the University of Georgia.

Credit: ArtsATL

Credit: ArtsATL

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