ALASKA. Having a miserable time. Wish you were here.

What if somewhere inside me there is a dark limbo where all the truly important memories are heaped and slowly turning into mud? -- Haruki Marukami, Norwegian Wood

ALASKA, that is what we call a supposed interior space, the existence of a last room. The body as a tenant of spaces, as a container of memories...ALASKA, a place we all know but nobody has ever been. -- from program notes for Diana Szeinblum's ALASKA

I've missed previous work by Argentinian choreographer Diana Szeinblum--in particular, her Secreto y Malibú, which has won international praise and honors. So, I'm grateful that a friend urged me to take the opportunity to see ALASKA (2007), now in its New York premiere season through tomorrow evening at Dance Theater Workshop. I saw it last night, and the experience wracked me in body, mind and soul.

Szeinblum, who trained and performed with Pina Bausch, created this work with her dancers--she prefers to call them "interpreters" and considers movement to be a form of text--who worked with her for the past 1-1/2 years. In that short amount of time, they developed an uncommon degree of trust. The piece demands extraordinary physical and emotional vulnerability and courage.

In every moment, the obsessive, brutally-driven movements show the body's desperation to violently expel toxic experiences and memories lodged in every cell. If it is necessary to tear itself apart to do that job, it will make every effort to do so. I have always maintained that those of us who are finely sensitive to energies--and, in particular, sensitive to dance--are deeply affected and changed by what we see dancers do. It's unlikely that many observers will leave this performance feeling untouched by it.

Szeinblum's creative team includes interpreters Lucas Condro, Noelia Leonzio, Alejandra Ferreyra Ortiz and Pablo Lugones; composer and pianist Ulises Conti; violist Mariano Malamud; lighting designer Gonzalo Cordova. It has been suggested to me by one observer that Secreto y Malibú is the far better work. If so, I resolve to see Secreto y Malibú someday.

For more information and tickets, click here.