Jeremy Wade's new show in the close quarters of Joyce SoHo this week (...and pulled out their hair) got me in the gut. That's nothing new. Most people find Wade's unrelentingly spastic, grotesque choreography viscerally wrenching. But what really set me off this time was one dancer's horrendous, nearly endless sobbing wail. Humans must be hardwired to respond at gut level to an enormous expression of distress like this--or perhaps it was just me. It was inescapably horrifying and exhausting to listen to her. It's important for certain artists to show us anti-beauty and rip us out of our security, and Wade has brilliantly devised ways to do so. As others have noted, his own uprooting from the U.S.--he now lives and works in Berlin--seems to fit what he's about. The season concludes this Sunday with an 8pm performance.
Master puppet theater artist Basil Twist's Bessie Award-winning Dogugaeshi has returned to Japan Society, running now through September 22. I was entranced by layer after layer after layer of painted screens, each one parting and sliding and revealing the next layer behind it, seemingly without end. I was charmed by the tilting, dancing candles and the all-too-elusive white fox with the huge, almond-shaped eyes. But what really got me in the gut was the twist at the end--which I won't give away, on the chance that it might just grip you the way that it gripped me and move you to tears. I am in awe of this artist.