Sarah Michelson's "Devotion"

In the right (or the wrong) hands, The Kitchen's black box theater can be a pressure cooker. I don't know whether Sarah Michelson's hands are right or wrong. I think, whenever I see her work, I'm never completely clear about that--and maybe she isn't, either--and, on some level, that's okay. But there were moments last night when I felt like bolting from my seat.

What is devotion (and Devotion)? In Michelson's hands, it is certainly a state of intensity, located just past the intersection of Philip Glass and Lucinda Childs, on the edge of danger. In the bodies of her dancers--best exemplified here by valiant Rebecca Warner--and performers from Richard Maxwell's New York City Players, it is an obsessive, mangled (and mangling) formalism that drives, strains and splays movement beyond the point where it is accceptable (and potentially beautiful) to our eyes, just as the volume and repetition of the work's accompanying music is often pushed past the point where we can absorb it without our scalps throbbing and crawling. Recently, when songwriter Gerry Rafferty died, I thought of Michelson and her similar appropriation of his melancholy hit "Baker Street"--in an endlessly looping cover version--for her piece, Daylight. 

Her theater feels at once severe and manic, a space where performers push and push and push themselves like Olympic athletes in the cold blast of eccentrically-placed light, where a gargantuan cluster of lights swings with potential lethality over their heads, where we sit, trapped in our winter clothes and too-close seats, feeling whipped up--and whipped to the bone--by the sonic, visual and kinetic energy in the room for an uninterrupted 100 minutes.

Her dancers bear--and, I mean, bear--these roles: Spirit of Religion (Nicole Mannarino), Mary (Non Griffiths), Jesus (James Tyson), Adam (Jim Fletcher), Eve (Eleanor Hullihan) and a quartet of Prophets (Neal Medlyn, Alice Downing, Liz Jenetopulos and Nancy Kim). TM Davy's icon-like portraits of Michelson and a young musician, with their black backgrounds, hang high above the black space; the evening concludes with these painted figures' luminosity being the last thing we see before we're released into the night--a kind of benediction.

With text by Richard Maxwell, original music by Pete Drungle, lighting by Michelson and Zack Tinkelman, and costumes by James Kidd, Shaina Mote and Michelson.

Devotion runs now through Saturday, January 22 at 8pm. No late seating. Schedule and tickets

The Kitchen

512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan

(directions)