‘Old Growth’ by Loom Lab at Southern Theatre during the 2024 Minnesota Fringe Festival. (Photographs by Alex Clark)
Re Edahl. (Photo courtesy of Re Edahl)
Re Edahl and Cal O’Brien, the co-artists of Minneapolis-and-Atlanta-based performance company Loom Lab, first met at a party in Minneapolis in 2017. According to Edahl, they spent the entire evening talking about dance, Edahl’s area of expertise, and theater, O’Brien’s. Both artists wanted to see more hybrid work where text, gesture and spoken word all inform what unfolds onstage.
O’Brien remains in Minnesota, but Edahl now calls Atlanta home, and Loom Lab is staging its first production here at the Windmill Arts Center. Running August 1 through August 3 and August 8 through August 10, Old Growth will feature an all-Atlanta cast telling the story of two archetypal characters, Mourner and Wanderer, who journey through loss and grief to find community.
Loom Lab got its start when Edahl was accepted into Minnesota Fringe Festival a few weeks after the party. “It’s a lottery system,” said Edahl. “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.”
Cal O’Brien. (Photo by Forrest Wasko)
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,” said Edahl, “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.”
While the narrative arc of Old Growth does reflect 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 both 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.
Old Growth by Loom Lab at Southern Theatre during Minnesota Fringe Festival in 2024. (Photographs by Alex Clark)
“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.
Edahl and O’Brien have drawn upon a variety of art forms — including puppetry; song; acrobatics and 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,” said Edahl. “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.” Once a gesture has engaged the audience’s attention, their senses can be attuned to how meaning is communicated through the more abstract vocabulary in a work.
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 is currently part of the cast for several pieces in a repertory show that Meaghan Novoa is staging in March of 2026.
Novoa brought Edahl on board after witnessing their studio presence as the understudy for Novoa’s Fractal, which premiered at the Dance Canvas Choreographer Career Development Initiative showcase in March.
“I felt like I was kind of asking the impossible — for one person to cover five different people’s roles,” Novoa said. “But, honestly, they not only did it, they did it incredibly well. I think they ended up stepping in for every single dancer at one point, and, honestly, I was just shocked every single time that they seemed to know all of the blocking and all of the partnering. It was kind of seamless.”
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 altogether 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.
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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.
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