"Don't make me stop now..."

choreographer Julian Barnett
(photo: Corrine Furman)

Julian Barnett Project in Super Natural
(photo: Corrine Furman)

So, is it super? Or is it natural?

In Super Natural, now showing at Dance New Amsterdam, choreographer Julian Barnett works the argument that it's both, and you can see that even from the clever division in his title. The performing body, pushed to extremes, manifests both. The dancer transcends himself or herself, becoming all intermingled with others in altered states, energy transmission and potential telepathic communication. At least, that's what Barnett has had to say about it. His research for this evening-length world premiere included interviews with psychics, and I'm certainly sympathetic to his interests and conclusions. But has he brought us anything new or even wrapped it in a new package?

I ask about the package because much has been made of Barnett's choice to reorganize the focal point of his performance space and audience seating in a V-shape along two sides of DNA's theater. The audience initially peers into a far corner where composer Chris Powers will play his drums. That might be a little different at first--an intense focus on the musician and his gleaming instruments, which he has first gathered from various points around the space. But after dancers occupy the space and complicate the view, it's unclear whether the original diagonal viewpoint continues to have effect or meaning.

Far more viscerally effective is the way one or another dancer might zoom up close to the front row of watchers, and the way dancers slam into the floor, sometimes repeatedly, causing us to feel their impact under our bottoms. Good effects, but innovative? Both have been done before--deliberately or by chance.

Dancers Barnett, Phina Pipia, Justin Ternullo and Jocelyn Tobias appear to be on intense individual but sometimes parallel, sometimes overlapping journeys in communal space, their movements alternately convulsive and stretchy and with a sense of fleshy solidity that underscores risk and consequence, far from lighter than air. And yet, as in ballet, these heedless dancers seem to want out of the very bodies that make it possible for dancers to get high--in both senses of that word.

My first look at Barnett's spatial arrangement made me think back, just a week or so, to Tom Pearson's premiere of Walking in Two at DNA which, in turn, had made me think back a few seasons to a piece Miguel Gutierrez showed at Abrons Arts Center. Both, in a roughly equivalent way, messed with the usual way audiences sit and stare. And those are just two recent examples.

If you really want to give audience members a near-psychic experience of bodies in motion, what would you do? It seems to me that simply angling them in a different way doesn't quite get it. You might have to hang us upside down over the space--or something. Or pass out some drugs. I'm not trying to be snarky, but if you really intend to shake us up, come harder.

Similarly, Barnett's quest for a kind of spiritual crescendo--in movement, in consciousness--has numerous antecedents, from Sufi whirling to David Zambrano's Soul Project and far too many points in between to mention. Zambrano's dancers modeled their quirkily virtuosic solos after the energy of Black soul music, and I thought of that when Barnett brought on Otis Redding's "I've Been Loving You Too Long."

I like Barnett and happened to read a few interviews that he gave to journalists before the opening of Super Natural. Finally seeing the piece made me wonder if the way an artist might feel the need to explain a new piece (and his or her process in developing it) could sometimes end up doing it a disservice. It should take nothing away from the accomplishment of its fierce performers to question whether Super Natural can stand on its own without all the distracting talk. 

Julian Barnett Project performs Super Natural tonight at 8pm and tomorrow at 3pm. 

Information and Ticketing

Dance New Amsterdam

280 Broadway, 2nd Floor, Manhattan

(entrance on Chambers Street)