Gina Gibney Dance: The Distance Between Us

The Distance Between Us--the new piece by Gina Gibney, closing tonight at the Ailey Citigroup Theater--looks very much like a short story filled with characters engaged in shifting relationships. I can't tell you exactly what those relationships are, but this is the sort of work that asks a watcher to tilt forward and read into it whatever is in the watcher's experience and soul. It's a sophisticated, if abstract and tantalizingly enigmatic, tale. It unfolds within an extraordinary environment--one that seems to breathe, pulsate, flush with emotion, harbor haunting memories and even speak like a living being--created by Kathy Kaufmann (lighting), Lex Liang (set) and Ryan Lott (music).

Among Gibney's six women dancers--always a strong, vivid bunch--Courtney Drasner, Janessa Clark and Kristy Kuhn give especially focused, super-energized performances that make them seem larger than life. Naoko Nagata's dizzily constructed black-and-white costumes are the only feature that seems a little off, a little too kicky for the low-key tone of this piece; otherwise, they have and contribute their offbeat appeal to this rich production.

Gibney's initial solo segment for the tall, gorgeous Drasner introduces the tidal flow of so much of the movement: the lush, lashing, twirling and spongey moves, performed with ease and confidence, that appear throughout much of Distance, running through solos, duets and ensemble gatherings in which stuff, whatever it is, happens in privacy or with others. Gibney has given herself a lot of time and space in which to have stuff happen, and sometimes this generosity seems to have worked against the kind of scrupulous decision-making that chooses what's most crucial for us to see and that guarantees variety of texture. There are any number of places at which the dance seems to have reached an end but continues. Still I would much rather sit out a lengthy Gibney dance than many another choreographer's because she has an eye for sensuous beauty and an appetite for feeling.

(c) Eva Yaa Asantewaa, 2007