No, I don't mean thunderstorms...although that could happen at any time. I'm talking about two mighty performances in Drenched, a 2012 duet with choreographer Luke Murphy and his stalwart colleague Carlye Eckert at La MaMa, concluding its run tomorrow.
This summer, La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival has proudly displayed the slogan for its international lineup--"Beyond Borders"--a timely and right-on one for so many reasons. Murphy, who divides work between our city and his homeland, Ireland--establishes physical, psychic and emotional borders with Eckert, then ends by washing over those borders quite literally as the pair slide and slosh through a big spill of water.
Performed in the tiny First Floor Theatre, Drenched races us through the outer and inner lives of each half of a romantic couple. It launches a brilliantly orchestrated, inescapable assault on the senses. Imagine falling headfirst into a massive shredder along with every famous romantic Hollywood movie scene you've surely witnessed and some you haven't (and toss in a bit of porn) with visual projections, viscerally loud and reverberating music and audio clips of dialogue, overlapping and coming at you from various directions, and often intense, rambunctious dancing by this irrepressible pair. Its funny and not a little disturbing and frightening, too.
Eckert is particularly unflappable and strong in her role. This tough cookie will astonish you. But both possess impressive stamina, precision, liquidity and well-calibrated, dramatic expressiveness. David Fishel's multi-channel video installation and design is a thing of wonder--in itself, worth your trip to East 4th Street.
Drenched concludes La MaMa Moves! for this year. See it tonight at 7:30pm or tomorrow, Sunday, at 2:30pm. Hurry, though: Tickets are moving as fast as Murphy and Eckert!
For tickets and information, click here.
La MaMa
74A East 4th Street (between Bowery and 2nd Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)
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