Are you sincere? Harrell's "Quartet"

There are good-enough dances that stay on their side of the audience-performer divide, slide in front of your eyes, take a quick bow, and go. Nod fondly at them or turn away, unaffected and cold; it might not matter, one way or the other.

Quartet for the End of Time--created by Trajal Harrell and a disciplined team of performers and other collaborators, including dramaturg Julie Perrin--is not one of these.

Strangely, though, part of what drives this 90-minute work is just that kind of sliding by and going: the stylized yet casually cool demeanor of runway models and the apparent out-of-bodiness of erotic dancers. Yet, Harrell employs these same methods of presentation to question whether we've unknowingly slipped past an age of irony into one in which a renewed sincerity--an embodied sincerity--has regained a legitimate place within contemporary dance. The acknowledged sincerity of Olivier Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time--a work of celestial beauty created inside the hell of Nazi imprisonment--provides the sticky base for Harrell's imaginative, multimedia exploration.

Dancers Sirah Foighel, Will Gordon, Liz Santoro and Christina Vasileiou provide exceptional performances (with the additional challenge of frequent nudity).

In his program notes, Harrell writes:

This dance is nothing more and nothing less than Maybe to spectacle. Maybe to virtuosity. Maybe to transformations and magic and make believe. Maybe to glamour and transcendancy of the star image. Maybe to the heroic.....Maybe to style....Maybe to seduction of the spectator by the wiles of the performer....Maybe to moving or being moved.

Are you ready for that? Virtuosity, magic, glamour, heroism, style...it's all there in Quartet, if you want it. The production issues from the murky, gloomy underground, haunted by the dead, and yet it dazzles. The visual elements--Erik Flatmo's set, Thomas Dunn's lighting and imagery by David Bergé and Harrell--conjure a space of shifting dimensionality, one that flattens, one moment, and fattens, the next.

Projected images face us straight on or, seductively, fold away sideways, as if someone is manipulating a giant pair of those skinny iPods. Messiaen's music has somehow magnetized samples from the likes of Imani Uzuri, Nina Simone, DJ Assault and Antony & The Johnsons. The energy of the imagery, sounds, and performance is richly layered but never hectic. The stylistic sophistication and the underlying sincerity contain each other, locked together like yin and yang.

This is a master work, one that will be remembered as a highlight of this dance season and of Harrell's provocative career.

Quartet for the End of Time continues tonight through Saturday at Dance Theater Workshop with performances at 7:30pm. Tonight, Thursday, meet Harrell for a pre-show "Coffee and Conversation" talk with Stephen Greco at 6:30pm in DTW's lobby.

In addition, Harrell will show Tickle the Sleeping Giant (stage number 8)--a "permanent work-in-progress"--on Saturday at 2pm (free to Quartet ticket holders).