Zaritt: the ties that fail to bind

Watching Jesse Zaritt dance his solo Binding, I could not help but flash back to perhaps the strangest, most cringe-worthy reaction anyone has ever had upon meeting President Obama: "You're a hottie with a smokin' body!"

Okay, way stranger things have been said about Obama. Way, way stranger things. But truer things may never have been said about Jesse Zaritt. Buff but elegantly slender, supple and lyrical, Zaritt is one of contemporary dance's most beautiful movers. To my eye, that pretty much sums up what Binding has to offer.

I get that this roughly 40-minute multimedia solo--performed as part of the soloNOVA Arts Festival in Performance Space 122's downstairs theater--is an interior spacewalk through one guy's repressed and released sensuality. ("A rapture of violence and tenderness," say the publicity notes.) That's cool. But I think a lot must have gotten lost in all the vague, awkward fussing about with stretchy fabric. I'm just not getting what--beyond Zaritt's seamless, rubbery slipping, flipping and gliding--is going on here choreographically and why it should matter.

Sharath Patel's sound work--including the queer grandeur of Freddy Mercury and a tingling, sonically delicious song played backwards--conjures an expansive space for powerful magic, but the magic never arrives.

Binding has closed, but terraNOVA Collective's 7th Annual soloNOVA Arts Festival--devoted to solo performance as a form of storytelling--continues through June 6 at PS 122. For more information and ticketing, click here.