Tom’s Wealth is described as a community event, and it demonstrates a central contradiction. Dance for the masses is a great experience, often a transforming one, for the participants, but their capabilities can’t often stretch to meet an audience’s theatrical demands. It seemed to me that Corbett made an intelligent merger between the masses and the professionals, but the dance’s individual sections were so fragmentary they didn’t quite add up.
At the last, the group people are lying down in a blue light, slowly rolling, one at a time, from their backs to their stomachs, while a dancer solos in the background, lit with gold against a pink sky, a symbolic sunrise over a calm ocean. Then everything is still for a moment, till you hear a door creaking shut.
, Tsai Performance Center, Tom Sawyer, Marjorie Morgan, More