Funhouse: Yanira Castro transforms DTW

Yanira Castro + Company will give two more performances of Center of Sleep at Dance Theater Workshop (tonight and Saturday night) and, if you can, you must go.

I can't say I'm happy to see all of the details of the installation and action given away by Dance View Times's reviewer, Tom Phillips. In this work, the audience is best left unprepared, fresh for the experience and for the invitation to--as a neat non-instruction card instructs us--"Do as you please." (The rest of the card reads, "Assurances for an audience/No one will touch you./No one will ask anything of you./You are safe." The reverse advises--but does not demand--that we leave our bags and coats in the check room.) I think the work's delicately powerful, powerfully delicate conclusion, if nothing else, needs to be a surprise for the new audiences. I would have held back on spelling out what happens there.

Let's just say that Yanira Castro and her collaborators--especially composer Stephan Moore and lighting and installation designer Roderick Murray--have brilliantly turned DTW's stage into a funhouse that is constantly changing and requiring you, the viewer, to also move and change as vivid dream visions and dream sounds reach you from everywhere. William Forsythe did something approaching this with his dance installation, You Made Me A Monster, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center nearly a year ago. Although Forsythe's theme was radically different, his piece was set in a dimly-lit studio and sent dancers out amid a standing, initially participatory audience. It too had a strange, striking sound score. But Center of Sleep is the far more searching, courageous and accomplished work.

Castro credits her performers as collaborators. They are marvelous, and they are Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, Heather Olson, Joseph Poulson and Ashley Steele. Special honors to Stephan Moore, whose musical ingenuity knows no limit of means or delight.