Dance theater as dark art: "PURO DESEO"

Back in April, my colleague Andy Horwitz (of Culturebot) reviewed luciana achugar’s PURO DESEO when it premiered at The Kitchen and called it “several kinds of awesome.” I usually try my damnedest to avoid that word, but--damn it--Andy got it right. Achugar has delivered a work that should define the experience of awesomeness in dance theater. She and her creative team went on to win a 2010 Bessie for it, much deserved.

Having missed the Kitchen season, I grabbed the chance to catch up with PURO DESEO during Ben Pryor’s innovative American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center.

The first thing that got me was the gutsiness of starting it off in darkness and keeping the audience visually locked down for a very long time, with just achugar’s sing-song voice rising from the far side of the audience, repetitively singing a Spanish lyric, her faint tone slowly intensifying from folksiness to a slightly more strident pitch, and then the sound of something heavy passing me in the aisle, pounding its way towards the stage. Lighting designer Madeline Best is several kinds of gutsy, too. When we’re finally permitted to see, she lights the playhouse’s raw stage to suggest some dank, fire-lit cave of the mind, one you’d do well to avoid.

Thoughout the hour-long piece, achugar and collaborator Michael Mahalchick roam that mysterious, unholy space like ritualists gone quite mad. Awkwardly swathed in heavy black drapery and elbow-length leather gloves, achugar shuffles, shuffles, shuffles, retracing her steps along a proscribed, diagonal path and turning her head to give us an impersonal, unseeing, chilling stare. Best’s lighting later picks out Mahalchick writhing on the floor like a beached walrus. The piece proceeds with solo segments and interactions between these two looming figures in a Gothic atmosphere where desire looks less than pure.

In one lacerating achugar solo, Best brutalizes our eyes (and nerves) by frantically switching light on and off. Eyes simply can’t adjust that rapidly, and it hurts, though achugar, repeatedly slamming herself onto the floor, is surely hurting more.

Another disturbing segment finds achugar flat on her back while Mahalchick, making wizard-like gestures with his arms, works her splayed legs as if by remote control. In another sequence, the two run through a long, striking series of strong, precise gestures of the arms and hands. As the pace of this gesticulation increased, I felt myself slipping into a trance I did not desire and twice had to yank myself back. Powerful stuff.

The sophistication of that ritualistic sequence--both as theater and as, well, a dark art--conflicts with apparently artless elements, such as when achugar, for no discernible purpose, rattles the metal gate at the rear of the stage. That noisemaking doesn’t add much...and yet it works...doesn’t work...works...doesn’t work. Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s hard to settle one way or the other on this, and yet it seems very achugar, very much about simply throwing something at water to disrupt its surface.

PURO DESEO runs for just one more performance at Abrons--tomorrow, Sunday, at 5:30pm. Hurry for tickets!

Abrons Arts Center
Henry Street Settlemen
466 Grand Street (off Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)