June 2 to June 4, 2016
512 W 19th Street (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

What is dust but history settling itself? Yvonne Rainer’s latest permutation of the ongoing project, The Concept of Dust, performed at The Kitchen, began quite literally with the death of an author. The stage was empty save for a white towel, pillow, and grey folding chair. The dancers, as they walked on stage, appeared not serious but devastated. Rainer began to speak: “I have a sad announcement to make tonight. One of our members won’t be here; Pat Catterson died last night.” Before the audience could react, a voice yelled from offstage, “No, what the fuck, Yvonne? What are you trying to do, get rid of me?” The forced farce — Catterson’s response sounded like that of an overly dramatic television actress — triggered first nervous, then genuine laughter from the audience as Catterson and Rainer eyed each other warily in the center of the floor. Though as the dance progressed this beginning increasingly faded from memory, the concept of lost, disembodied, or assumed voices became the spine of the piece.

Catterson soon, again, became the central figure as she began to tap dance, explaining as she danced:

During the voyage from Africa, slaves were occasionally brought up from the ship’s hull and made to dance. They were worth money now, and the physical exercise helped keep them alive. Imagine what this meant: they did routines that a month or two earlier had been part of the observance of their religion, or the celebration of a feast day, or the expression of their relationship with their grandparents. Anyone who hears this story will feel the burden of reconciliation built into tap.

With this speech — which was likely found text, as indicated by Rainer in her text on the piece — Catterson turns the once-comic atmosphere shades darker. While some of the dancers’ ensuing movements are intentionally stilted and quotidian, they can no longer be quite as amusing as much of the audience seemed to believe, laughing along. Instead, the movements and voices begin to feel hysterical. As slow violin music plays, a low and incoherent woman’s voice is subtly woven into the soundscape as if it were a subconscious murmur conducting the dancers, who improvisationally iterate small, choreographed passage of movement. Their imperfect coordination conveys informality reminiscent of rehearsal. Combined with the hysterical impulses woven into the choreography, this informality surfaces Rainer’s concern for the elemental chaos within the apparent order of daily life, which also comes through in her chosen texts. Dust is the ultimate mark of quotidian life, for it can only exist among whatever has become so routine as to be neglected.

The informality and familiarity of the dancers’ motions also allows each dancer to communicate their personality; with time, one notices how the same move looks different across bodies. Fifth position arms look best on the dancer who moves most lightly and elegantly. In ballet, the merging of body with gesture may be desirable, but in this choreography Rainer seems more interested in pointing to the citation of movement, paralleling the citation of text. Here, the same move looks best on the body that performs it most unnaturally, thus highlighting the difference between a routine and learned movement. And again, given the forced look of these movements on the dancers’ bodies,Catterson’s mention of being “made to dance” boils to the surface.

Rainer’s quoted texts are compiled in a stapled packet of papers, which she flips through during the performance, first while sitting in a chair at the edge of the stage, and then while running to the side of a dancer to ask them to read an excerpt. Most of them do so willingly, but some run away as Rainer approaches. When she finally catches up, she captures in her microphone only a gasp or guttural sound. But that appears satisfactory, as if “gasp” were part of the text. Though largely disconnected, and from sources including the Metropolitan Museum and New York Times, some texts are identified, such as excerpts from Kingsley Amis and from Maureen N McLane’s My Poets (2012). Rainer may introduce these partly for amusement, but also because they seem to be neglected stories: later in the dance, she reads a story about a young black man who was wrongly arrested for possession of drug paraphernalia, beaten up in jail, and later released but with permanently damaged eyes. By blowing the dust off of these stories, one brings them back into the present, calls attention to their contemporary relevance.

Citations are defined by their removal from an original context. Because the performers may rearrange the phrases of the dance as they perform — and presumably Rainer may rearrange the order of the spoken texts — it is not their sequence or trajectory but rather their similarities that reveal Rainer’s intentions. In one phrase of the dance, the lights turn off completely. A voice speaks, that of an invisible narrator. She recites the history of a fossil. As she reads, one can hear that she is reading from a printed text, for she repeats some words and mispronounces others. Stumbling over words and imperfectly miming movements are both acts of citation. They also allow the voices and motions of history to become personalized, no longer omnipotent and objective. History is defined by its belonging to the past; it is made visible only in its residues, its accumulation of context: references, citations and dust.

The post Dust Settling: Yvonne Rainer Choreographs History at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

February 18 to February 20, 2016
512 West 19th Street (between 9th and 10th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

In the tradition of Trisha Brown’s dance diagrams, Liz Santoro and Pierre Godard presented an intricate work at The Kitchen, called For Claude Shannon, with its own palette of densities, gestures, and articulations. Each performance is individually coded “using the syntactic structure of a sentence by Claude Shannon,” the influential founder of information theory, which is translated into a combination of movement “atoms,” forming a kind of algorithmic lexicon.

As I entered the black box theatre, speakers emitted sounds like air vents blowing in an airplane, always too cold. My “vent” turns closed; my hearing shifts to another aisle.

After awhile, I begin to wonder if this performance will ever start, if the lights will ever dim, if the audience will begin to check their watches and then realize, half an hour into the performance, that it had already begun before they walked into the room. “The dancers begin to learn this particular choreographic sequence two hours before the public enters the space,” we have been told, “and continue this learning process during the performance.” We watch them learn.

The fans all close. Four bodies turn to face us.

One of the three female dancers lifts her arms, holding an expanding bubble. Her male partner’s left leg rises imperceptibly, then again more pointedly as hers lifts, too. Another female dancer’s torso turns. I concentrate on the small sound of a shoe’s sole — with tiny, pebbled bumps, it seems — lifting off a flat floor, as if adhesive.

They move so slowly that if I stop to trace one, as I would like to do, I miss the subtlety of the others’ movements. An arm held perpendicular or parallel to the floor, a leg either supporting or extending diagonally away from the body — these are the movements to which I become attuned, looking for symmetry or failure.

The farthest female dancer’s eyes blink rapidly, like shutters, as all turn to face each other. They are suddenly, now, in coordination, at least for a moment. Their slipper shoes create a soundscape, within which they weave closer together, folding their arms like leaves of creased paper to create an origami box. I feel tension, can’t breathe too hard for fear of coughing and interrupting the intensity of their concentrated gazes.

Closer, nearly intersecting, then apart, one movement at a time, they drift. The dance becomes a waiting game.

Then, a prick of disbelief: two touch! And one goes still. I read in her immobility the shock of having been interrupted during a mechanical sequence. Yet this is not an inhuman dance; if it were, we would not sense their effort and uncertainties, hesitations and unravelings.

Why these “atoms” of movement? Never two arms up together, never two legs straddled apart. Is the sequence there, written on the floor like Braille or Morse code in black strips of alternating lengths and positions? Is Shannon’s phrase a chain link through their limbs?

They dance in dress clothes. The lights never change. How are the pauses, turns, positions, and relative durations of each movement determined? What portion of sequences are repeated? Does a choreography determined by a form of speech count as one of chance? What was the phrase that we now must exhaust?

Eventually they return again to their original positions. They pause, then begin to move in synchrony. Gradually, the air pressure changes, which we experience as shifts in pitch, crackles like static in the soundscape, and popping ears in a disjointed physicality. One dancer breaks out of line and another follows, then returns. Was that a mistake? A moment of learning?

The sound is now regular, having incorporated the static clicks into a new beat. Each body moves in sync, but each turns individually until none face forward.

A word is uttered. Was it from the audience?

Again. No, it came from the stage.

“Either”
“Accidentally”
“Passage”

They are revealing the phrase.

“Selecting”

But this is too easy, too obvious, for them to expose the mechanism behind the dance.

“Use”
“One”
“Wait”
“A”
(“Minute”?)

I want to think. But the phrase is incomplete.
The clicks pick up, coordinating time and dictating movement.

“Point,” spoken all together. They move quite quickly now, nearly fluidly. The clicks sound like two blocks clacked together, as in Joan Jonas’s Song Delay (1973). The spatiality of sound seems important but does not clearly correspond to their configurations on stage. The words come too quickly to record now, and I wonder when the sound will mark a tempo too fast for them to follow. Who will collapse? Which atoms will be sacrificed?

Then, the dancers are still. Can they not continue? Has the phrase ended?

One dances again, so quickly, as if tap dancing. Another begins, too. The clicks pick up again to the point of becoming static, so loud that they obscure the sound of the dancers’ voices. Sometimes a body will pause, as if to remember its place in the sequence. Is this learning? What are the stakes? How can we know when they have failed?

Static turns to hail. They speak louder but move elegantly. They must fight their inertia.

New movements emerge out of transitory positions: a leg raised too high, a jump kick, a sideways stance, a lunge.

Then a diagonal movement by one dancer across the floor— there have been none thus far — and the heaviness of the bass begins to parallel the new heaviness of their bodies.

Yet this improvisational segment lasts too long; rather than demonstrating a collapse of the code or a fracture, it becomes a new segment in itself, forcing me to lose my hold on the atoms that seemed so clearly defined from the start. Or was that the intention, for us to unlearn what the dancers had learned only “two hours before the public enters the space”? The chance of subjective improvisation has trumped the chance of an atomic composition.

Finally, the beat slows. The bass fades and the clicks return to irregular taps. Jostling bodies move but without grandiose gestures.

All face the front.

The post Data Dance: Ode to an Information Theorist at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

January 7 through February 27, 2016
512 West 19th Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

Mary Lucier, who has long worked at the intersection of music and the visual arts, weaves together past and present for her current video installations at the Kitchen, which is marking its forty-fifth anniversary with a series of events and exhibitions. Color Phantoms with Automatic Writing commemorates Lucier’s friend and collaborator, composer Robert Ashley, who died in 2014 and whose production with choreographer Steve Paxton, Quicksand, was concurrently featured on the Kitchen’s stage earlier this month. Revisiting works going back to 1971, Lucier draws on editing techniques of layering and displacement to provide an elegant frame for the Kitchen’s celebration of multimedia research.

Lucier literally introduces the Kitchen’s current programs, with a four-channel work in the theater lobby and a more elaborate installation at the entrance to the second floor gallery. Richly furnished with memorabilia, the upstairs entry recreates the waiting room of a psychoanalyst, with plain wooden chairs randomly arranged in front of a projected video of Ashley in his studio. Layering past and present, Lucier inflects this footage with a sense of loss, covering the projection in a luminous scrim of pixillated snow that evokes its distance in time. An oriental rug that once belonged to Dorothea Tanning leads into the adjoining “office”. Here, where the business of analysis focuses on the recovery of the subconscious, more rugs and cushions create a sense of oriental luxury, while the furnishings, modeled on those of Freud’s office, evoke the era of surrealism: a bookcase of esoteric texts, ethnographic artifacts, and artworks by Max Ernst, Tanning’s husband, set psychoanalysis itself in a distant temporal realm.

As though by magic, the viewer can enter and take his or her place on a magnificent leather couch, where a monitor suspended overhead offers entry into a realm of reverie. Composed in 1971 of slides taken from a moving car and layered with slides of black and white TV programs, Color Phantoms uses gradual dissolves to suggest movement, a sense of immersion indebted to surrealism, which she has developed with changing technologies throughout her career. The dialogue of analysis is displaced onto the soundtrack, in which a man’s and a woman’s voices are overlaid; Ashley, who had a mild form of Tourette’s Syndrome, generated the man’s voice from his own involuntary speech – hence the title, Automatic Writing, which conflates his process of music composition with the surrealist technique. He’s accompanied by electronic sounds and by the voice of a woman who translates his words into French. The analyst’s chair is empty (available to the participant). We are taken out of our internal space and encouraged to project our personal histories into the room’s poetic vagueness, transporting the serious work of analysis into a realm of artistic play.

In the downstairs lobby, Trial, a four-channel video, revisits Lucier’s 1974 footage of Ashley in performance with Merce Cunningham and his dancers at Cunningham’s studio. With characteristic openness, Cunningham accepted Ashley’s loosely scripted theater piece, The Trial of Anne Opie Wehrer and Unknown Accomplices for Crimes Against Humanity, as “decor” for his dancers, and welcomed Lucier and her video camera on stage. Through the lens, all is fragmentary, elusive. In a compression of space and time, Lucier directs the camera at a mirror at the end of the studio, in which Ashley and Anne Wehrer appear as reflections, seen from behind; Cunningham and his dancers also appear as reflections, but occasionally cross in front of the mirror. Sound consists of the couple’s indistinct conversation and ambient noise. The woman speaks constantly; they smoke and drink, kiss, and finally end up on the floor, as Ashley falls from his chair and his partner continues her conversation. Lucier moves back and forth from close-up to long shot, but these are projected here side by side, as though occurring simultaneously. The enigmatic austerity of the Cunningham event contrasts with the ornateness of Lucier’s upstairs installation, yet the reworking of old footage in both cases resembles the process of analysis, bringing lost materials to the surface as fodder for current investigation.

Back upstairs, From Minimalism into Algorithm extends this process. A group exhibition created by the Kitchen’s curatorial team, it juxtaposes, among other things, a plate of steel by Donald Judd, a video of Lucinda Childs dancing to Philip Glass’s music, multi-hued mounds built by termites provided with colored sand by Agnieszka Kurant, and labor-intensive paintings of paint made by Paul Sietsema. It proposes that the chance operations of Cage and Cunningham and the repetitive iterations of minimalism can offer a bridge to art in the digital age. Lucier’s story-telling instincts supply a context for this resurgence of primal materials, as she weaves installation, video and sound into personal and collective narratives that stimulate reflection on the Kitchen’s history. At forty-five, it’s become an institution, but, with experimental ambitions intact, it cultivates awareness of the past with an eye out for new possibilities.

The post In a Distant Temporal Realm: Mary Lucier at the Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

March 5 through April 11, 2015
512 W 19th St (between 10th and 11th avenues)
New York, 212 255 5793

Remember Ebola? The outbreak of the disease was the biggest news story of 2014, with no issue receiving more media coverage or search engine hits, proving that there’s still a great sensitivity to the idea of contagion in the country. This fear is often exploited in the name of branding, be it in the form of big-budget Sci-Fi movies or flu-shot sales.

Anicka Yi believes the same thing can be said about the general public’s idea of female networks. And in the dank and dimly lit gallery of her new exhibition, “You Can Call Me F,” at the Kitchen, she compares the two, pitting the public’s fear of pathogens with its fear of female networks as a threat to our patriarchal paradigms. For the show, Yi gathered biological samples (read: collected swabs) from 100 women in her professional network — artists, curators and friends. Most of these women are named, some of them recognizable art-world personalities; others remain anonymous. These samples are alive and on display in the gallery. And they’re growing.

The Kitchen’s second-floor gallery space is divided into two parts. The first is a small room with the show’s central work, Grabbing At Newer Vegetables (2015) — a rectangular and backlit Plexiglas box that is essentially a large petri dish. You can look at it closely, overhead, and are drawn to do so, it being the only source of light and activity in the gallery’s entrance. In it Yi has painted the words “YOU CAN CALL ME F,” using both the biological samples and agar, a substance derived from algae with a long tradition of being used to culture bacteria. This text, once big and blocky like that found on billboards or storefront signage, is now all but obscured by the organisms that have been growing around it since the show’s opening in March.

Simultaneously expanding and disappearing, “Grabbing At Newer Vegetables” cleverly subverts conventional notions of ephemerality and objecthood in visual art. It’s also an interesting take on using feminine fluids as material, a typical trope of the feminist art movement. And it doesn’t necessarily stop there: Yi, who has worked closely with the biology department at MIT, where she is currently in residency, has suggested she might even use the still-growing bacterium in future projects.

The second half of the gallery looks like the aftermath of a viral outbreak. It features five tent-like constructions meant to mimic quarantine units. But these units, roughly constructed from steel pipe and suspended vinyl, are actually open and thus not protective at all, the implication being that the concept of quarantining — extinction through isolation — is a flawed one. Inside the tents are various artifacts, all of which add the show’s themes to some extant: DVDs, calling attention to the Hollywoodization of viral disease; seaweed and dried shrimp, examples of simple organisms used for food; jars of kombucha, serving as a reminder of bacteria’s benefits, to name a few.

Most notably, in three of the tents are individual motorcycle helmets rotating slowly atop black rods, their visors slightly open like the larger encasement in which the sculptures sit. The helmets diffuse a unique scent that Yi developed specifically for the show. The scent is a hybrid of two other, distinct odors: one was obtained from the female samples; the second is the scent of the Gagosian Gallery, which Yi gathered using a device that takes and reproduces an air reading. She then worked with the “scent fabrication company” Air Variable to synthesize these two odors into her own fragrance.

The smell, though, is innocuous. It’s doubtful the gallery-goer would be conscious of it — not to mention the derivations thereof — were they not told about its peculiarity. And at first it seems that these works could be more effective if the smell were stronger, easier to detect: it would makes sense that a show comparing the insidiousness of deep-seated patriarchal systems to the threat of viral pathogens might benefit from establishing an equally visceral experience, forcing its audience to confront both.

Yet this same subtlety is the point. Smell, while the most redolent of the senses, is also the most elusive — we are only cognizant of it when something smells particularly good or particularly terrible; because we are rarely aware of smell, despite the fact that it is fundamental to our experiential relationship to a place, especially in memory, its power lies in its subtlety. That the scent of the Gagosian Gallery (which Yi suggests is the biggest perpetrator of art-world patriarchy) is hardly a scent at all reinforces the institution’s inequities. There’s also an implicit critique of the idea of the gallery as sterile white cube.

Considering all there is to see in the show, it’s surprising its most potent aspect lies in the olfactory experience, or lack thereof, it provides. This might be both the show’s biggest strength and its biggest weakness. The conceptual implications behind it are dense, though there remains a disconnect between this element and the rest of the ideas in the show. Too many cooks in the kitchen, so to speak.

The post Viral Feminism: Anicka Yi at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

The Kitchen

August 27 to October 5, 2013
512 West 19th Street
New York City, 212-255-5793

Gretchen Bender (1951-2004) was a pioneering video artist whose work was under appreciated in her own lifetime. Although Bender was connected to the group of artists known as the “Pictures Generation,” she never received the recognition and institutional legitimization that many of these artists now enjoy. A new exhibition at The Kitchen, Tracking the Thrill, suggests that Bender’s videos and her prophetic views on the media’s relationship to art and perception was ahead of its time, and that perhaps it is only now that the radical dissonance of her work can be fully appreciated.

The top floor of The Kitchen presents the video installation Wild Dead (1984), a video documentation of the lost performance piece Dumping Core (1984), and a sampling of her commercial work. Her flashy, high-speed intro for the television show “America’s Most Wanted” is shown alongside music videos she edited or directed for bands such as Megadeth and New Order. The slippage between these commercial works and her artwork is fascinating. As an artist who also worked in commercial television, Bender was something of a double agent: she played an active role in both developing and appropriating the system of commercial advertising to expose the viewer to the manipulative language of the industry. Bender was aware of an artwork’s half-life, and by controlling the high-speed intoxicating language of commercials she worked to stay one step ahead of art’s absorption back into advertising. She speaks with poetic urgency in a 1987 Bomb Magazine interview with Cindy Sherman about the power and effect of the media, describing it as “a cannibalistic river whose flow absorbs everything” and flattens out content. It is her recognition and intervention into this incessant movement that feels the most shockingly relevant today.

Total Recall occupies the entire bottom floor theater and takes its name from the 1990 film by Paul Verhoeven, which was still in production at the time. First exhibited at the Kitchen in 1987, the 18-minute video installation is an operatic tour de force, and curator Philip Vanderhyden does an excellent job in re-staging it. A stack of 24 television monitors and three projection screens pulsate with images woven together in a way that is both absorbing and frightening. As the viewer is confronted with bits of movies, news, personal graphics, and film, very rarely do all the monitors and screens show the same image simultaneously. The eight channel analog piece has a rhythm all its own and the work demands that the audience sync to its rapid pace. Bender’s long time collaborator Stuart Argabright’s soundtrack flutters between assault and surrender that perfectly compliments the visual speed of Total Recall. This unsettling pace will not allow a passive viewing; as soon as one begins to feel comfortable, the tempo of sound and image change radically. It is this fast-paced rate of change that is paramount to understanding this work and indeed Bender’s overarching vision. Because one is never fully able to grasp the entire work and although one might recognize commercial logos and fragmented images from popular culture, the edits destabilize a complete and “true” read of the symbols. We are left simply with their particle form, an aesthetic empty shell. As the hollowed scenes and symbols are sequenced, their speed and movement simultaneously become context and content.

Despite its chaotic abstraction Total Recall, like much of Bender’s work, evokes the political climate of the time. Regan-era conservatism and the monolithic aspect of consumer culture was pervasive, and Bender worked furiously to expose how advertising reflects our society’s obsession with entertainment. One merely needs to turn on a television (or stream digital news) to see just how prescient she was in anticipating the way we now consume information, and how our appetite for such rapid consumption is never satiated. Today, when so many artists are passively using the language of advertising, Gretchen Bender is a bold reminder that they should be “active agents.”  Although the current of information may be strong, we can jump in and change the flow of the pulse.

The post The Flow of the Pulse: Gretchen Bender at The Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

On the eve of Chantal Akerman’s solo exhibition of new video works at The Kitchen, the Belgian avant-garde filmmaker will read from a new autobiographical text, My Mother Laughs. The story is centered around the artist’s aging mother, and promises to be a distillation of the major themes of her career: memory, family, and the complexities of narrative. Akerman’s most recent film is Almayer’s Folly (2011) based on the Joseph Conrad novel of the same title.

Chantal Akerman: Maniac Shadows, curated by Tim Griffin and Lumi Tan, opens on Friday, April 12, and will be on view until May 11, 2013

The Kitchen is located at 512 West 19 Street, New York, NY 10011

(212) 255-5793

The post Who Laughs Last: Chantal Akerman Reads at the Kitchen appeared first on artcritical.

January 13-22, 2011
512 West 19 Street, between 10th and 11th avenues
New York City, (212) 255-5793

In Devotion, Sarah Michelson casts two male actors—James Tyson and Jim Fletcher of the New York City Players—to dance alongside Rebecca Warner, Non Griffiths, Nicole Mannarino and Eleanor Hullihan. Griffiths, now 14-years-old, started dancing for the eminent downtown choreographer when she only 9; Michelson has explored, in the past, ideas about authorship and virtuosity through the “naïve bodies” of preteen girls. In Devotion, which is an epic two-hour, aggressively physical ballet inspired by a piece of text by Richard Maxwell, she creates movements in which highly trained female bodies interact with the literal interpretation and visible exhaustion of male partners. All are put through enormously athletic, relentlessly repeating movement sequences. Tearing apart and re-combining components of ballet with outsized yoga poses and substantial references to Twyla Tharp’s In The Upper Room (including the piece’s Phillip Glass score), Michelson meets the religious content of Maxwell’s text with pure dance—movement riding the line between possible and not.

Michelson herself does not appear onstage in person, but is the subject, with Maxwell, of luminescent portraits by TM Davy that hang high along The Kitchen’s black walls. When I first entered the Chelsea space—which was rotated lengthwise with the high tapered seating removed, fewer but longer rows of chairs lined up against the side wall—the images emerging from pure black background seemed alive, as if the hanging canvases were windows through which one actually saw human beings posed in stillness. Michelson’s voice was also present. It piped into the space over the speakers—alternating with or accompanying musician Pete Drungle’s loud, atmospheric score—as Warner, playing the Narrator, physicalized Maxwell’s personal, colloquial version of the Old and New Testament.

Warner worked her way around the room with a commanding yet neutral presence.  She lunged forward with her upper spine arched and arms outstretched as if they might reach out of even her own skin, tilted from the waist, and spun with one or two arms out. Meanwhile, Michelson read: “Eve settles down and says plainly: We really are simple things. Simple, fearful things.” She continued, “Mary holding babe in the oblivion of no sleep. Let this be ordinary. Let it be away from the current. Let her have her time with her child. Mary, Jesus.” Fletcher played the physically demanding role of Adam—during the second hour he was literally running around the space, catching the Eve as she threw her body repeatedly into his arms. Tyson was Jesus opposite Girffiths’ Mary.

Her white blond hair tied tightly back against nearly translucent young skin, Griffiths has a certain thin frailty that created palpable tension each time she quivered after landing a sharp, reductionist leap. Despite this, she seemed to have enough determination and devotion to the material or some idea of dance and performance, to push through. She was also the perfectly cast Virgin Mother for this work; when she approached Tyson’s figure, the partnering seemed both accidental and necessary for her survival. She almost seemed as if she might fall without him, and yet she shined in a way his Jesus did not, and was not supposed to.

Griffiths changed shoes in front of the audience from sneakers into black dance shoes, and without preciousness or over-intellectualizing, it was clear that this was also a dance about dance: a play with derivative forms reaching back into history yet breaking through convention all the same. Everything, it seems in this piece, is on the line, yet the humans making it are also so clearly real: a rigorous execution of craft that manages not to mask the dancers’ bodies with technique.

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