D'Amour and Pearl bring us "Terrible Things"

A bunch of bright lights worked on Terrible Things, which you can enjoy at Performance Space 122, now through December 20. Written by longtime partners-in-crime-and-OBIE, Lisa D'Amour and Katie Pearl, choreographed by Emily Johnson, the piece is wonderfully performed by Pearl, Johnson, Morgan Thorson, Karen Sherman and a couple of amiable wrestlers (Rudy De La Cruz and Adrian Czmielewski).

If you're typically overwhelmed at this time of year--by the bigness, the brashness, the commercial-ness of it all--you might appreciate the compact intimacy of Terrible Things. Compact, yes, but big in personality. Just like Pearl, its undisputed star.

Everything/everyone here seems to be located somewhere in Pearl's busy cranium, a place bustling with memories, like the legion of plump marshmallows aligned with impeccable, subatomic regularity across the theater's floor. In the opening, dancers carefully, efficiently move through this strange, snowy field, delicately scooping aside some marshmallows with their elongated, velvety arms and making shapes of small quantities of the sweets. This sets the stage for the space to open up and light up with room to move freely, the vividness of primary colors, Pearl's non-stop, embodied storytelling, and the mystery of parallel--but not perfectly sync-ed--worlds in the time-space continuum.

Terrible Things is a modest delight, a fine corrective for the excesses of the season.

Schedule details and ticketing here.