Hoghe: "I invite dancers to my universe."

After a DTW performance of Sans-titre--wrought and performed by Raimund Hoghe (Germany) with Faustin Linyekula (Democratic Republic of Congo)--a respected colleague came up to me and told me that, even allowing for a broad definition, he failed to find much in the way of choreography in the piece. By this, I think he meant a deliberate, effective selection and arranging of movement material with connective tissue, some internal logic, a recognizable through-line. Instead, he found ideas and pieces of things here and there.

This frank assessment sent me into a momentary brain jam. The work had been, for me, intuitively recognizable as a "universe"--as Hoghe might call it--with its own structure and resonance. I had come out of the theater with chills up my back and feeling unable to speak and, what's more, feeling that words were not necessarily the most necessary things I could offer. In the course of seventy minutes, Hoghe and Linyekula had--through stark visual and kinetic elements and a haunting blend of Baroque music and Black spirituals--taken mundane space, marked it off for sacred work and turned it into a place of solemnity and tenderness. I felt no distance between myself, as spectator, and moments of loss, absence, grief or, for that matter, compassion and healing that these two men--different in so many ways--might have experienced in their lives.

The work is entitled "untitled," and it is a work that belongs to, and leaves generous space for, its audience. I cannot say how, but I know that I--as well as others--found ourselves inhabiting those spaces.

At the post-show Q&A--a curious and largely disappointing one, since DTW's Carla Peterson seemed unable to think up a way to engage Linyekula in a conversation dominated by Hoghe--Peterson noted that the audience had remained completely still during the performance. Listening and, now and then, gazing around me, I had noticed that, too. It felt, to me, like an attentiveness that ran unusually deep.

I note--but find myself less interested in--the striking differences between Hoghe and Linyekula. These include realities of race, age, nationality, culture, history and--the ones that usually make the most difference on a dance stage--physical form and ability. Hoghe--exposing his pronounced spinal deformity to our gaze--fits no conventional notion of dancer. (Please note: I wrote conventional.) Linyekula--youthful, slender, sinewy and with the facility of a marionette--is a handsome African Mercury, a dancing god. Their undeniable differences are Hoghe's preoccupation in this work--that and the possibility of human connection across difference.

What interested me more, in a personal way, as a former ritualist in women's spirituality circles, was the two men's creation and holding of ritual space, largely through minimalist iconography--blank sheets of white paper; pale-colored stones smoothed by the pressure of water--that simply takes you there. And as a former ritualist, I recognized, with a catch of my breath, Hoghe's equally deliberate, necessary, erasure of that space near the conclusion of the evening. Ritual space exists in a timeless place--a place out of ordinary human time. It is conjured as a protective enclosure for sacred work, and then it is carefully dispersed before we return to linear time and our day-to-day lives. Hoghe understands this.

Afterwards, in DTW's lobby, I felt I had returned to my life and the world a little too abruptly. Generally speaking, I prefer to incubate my experience with serious art--at least, overnight--before fully assessing it. Moreover, the Q&A felt strange. Had it not been for prompting from a choreographer in the audience, Linyekula--quietly sitting to Peterson's right--would not have been drawn into it at all. Peterson's body language--she was completely turned towards Hoghe for almost all of the time--puzzled me. Was she uncomfortable with the prospect of questioning Linyekula? Both men speak English clearly and both, I would think, could and should speak to the intention of the piece, the creative process and what the work feels like from inside. That Linyekula was left in silence for almost the entire time underscored difference--brought it roaring back into focus--in a way I found disturbing.

And yet this is our world. We leave the theater, leave sacred space, and we are right back in it. If theater, if ritual, has served its purpose, perhaps we will have learned something that we can use in the thick of things.

[Sans-titre, a co-presentation of Dance Theater Workshop and FIAF's Crossing the Line Festival]