Critic’s Notebook: Meh Meh” pits man vs. man”

• Aubrey Longley-Cook
• MALE ROOM: Dancers Erik Thurmond and Nicholas Goodly vie with each other to the sounds of Beyoncé in “Meh Meh” this weekend.

On Tuesday evening, I was lucky enough to sit in on a dress rehearsal for the dance performance “Meh Meh,” which is having its world premiere this weekend in a deliciously odd vintage space in the old Druid Hills Baptist Church on the corner of Ponce and Highland. The show, created by dancers Erik Thurmond of Decatur’s Core Performance Company and Nicholas Goodly formerly of gloATL, riffs on themes of male competition, militarism, libido, sadism and sport.

Much of the movement, says Thurmond, was inspired by Beyoncé’s recent album, and the soundscape itself, created and mixed live by Atlanta artist and musician Ben Coleman, is comprised of samples from those songs. The audience can surround the performance from a balcony or in the round along the sides of the small, arena-like space, which is hung with streaming pennant banners by artist Aubrey Longley-Cook and eerily lit by Kevin Byrd’s florescent light installation. The performance begins as the dancers select a conquest, going through a series of hyper-masculine, hyper-competitive tests of prowess and strength until one victor is left standing. Haunting, strange, discomforting, funny, barbarous, erotic and misanthropic, it’s a performance that’s not to be missed.