Forever hunger: Kimberly Bartosik at BAM Fisher

Joanna Kotze in Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you
(photo: Jim Coleman)

Lighting designer Roderick Murray's fluorescent tubes hang from the ceiling inside BAM Fisher's Fishman Space, colder and more severe than stalactites. Two dancers--Christian Allen and Lindsey Jones--step into the bare space of Kimberly Bartosik's I hunger for you. You can almost hear raptor wings, so forceful is the way they will lunge and beat and spin against the air. Arms lifting and rotated. Heavy breath audible. Heads and chins tilted upward. Torsos arching as they drop to a knee.

Burr Johnson, Dylan Crossman and Joanna Kotze--raptors, too, or perhaps angels, if angels have feet to strike mountainous earth--come in and churn and lash against the empty space as well. Back and forth, they cross it, overlapping in time and close pathways, until their labors clearly take a toll. Watching them, too, provides an initial sensation of exhilaration followed by exertion. When they stop--just stop and stand and shift inside and gasp--you feel the same internal wooziness, everything inside one's own body saying, "Hold up. Can we just settle back into order?"

I hunger for you plays with the risk of release--the kind of dropping of form and letting go that we experience in extremes of sensual and spiritual ecstasy--without guarantee of connection. Or guarantee that connection achieved will stay or will satisfy. A partner backs off or quietly quits the space entirely. The one remaining might freeze in a pose of hopelessness--arms wrenched forward from a torso bent as if in abject submission.

Much of the inspiration for the piece comes from the choreographer's religious upbringing, and it's interesting that she has cast her own child, Dahlia Bartosik-Murray, as a silent witness to some moments of Kotze's dancing as well as, later, a figure of release, coursing around the space like a wild filly.

Choreography: Kimberly Bartosik in collaboration with the dancers
Music: Sivan Jacobovitz, with arrangement by Kimberly Bartosik
Costume design: Harriet Jung
Sound Engineering: James Bigbee Garver
Dramaturgy: Melanie George

I hunger for you continues a sold-out run through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. For information, click here.

Also, Friday's audience is welcome to an informal post-show discussion, facilitated by Melanie George with Bartosik and company in BAM Fisher's Lower Lobby.

BAM Fisher
321 Ashland Place, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Kimberly Bartosik: In close quarters at Gibney Dance

Lance Gries and (in background) Joanna Kotze
perform alone in Gibney Dance's Agnes Varis Performance Lab.
(photos above and below: Scott Shaw)

If you're lucky enough to get in--I almost was not!--your first experience of Étroits sont les Vaisseaux might be the shock of nearly bumping into its two dancers already standing, breathing heavily and eyeing each other just inside the studio door. Well, there's not a lot of "inside' to the lobby studio at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center. Choreographers seem to be increasingly drawn to its challenge.

For this world premiere by dance artist Kimberly Bartosik and lighting, sound and set designer Roderick Murray (Kimberly Bartosik/daela), audience seating must stop at around twenty. Chairs and cushions fill skimpy corners of the narrow space with the performance area marked off by tape strips. Dancers Joanna Kotze and Lance Gries don't get a lot of room to roam, but their powerful actions make that little space ring like church bells. Their more intimate actions make space disappear entirely.

Étroits sont les Vaisseaux ("Narrow are the vessels") draws inspiration from an Anselm Kiefer sculpture that is long, narrow (like the Gibney space) but also rough, forbidding, even violent in form. The performance runs precisely 24:50, with an 8pm performance recapped each evening at 9. That sounds short but proves to be just enough. We're sealed in--door closed; shade to the street window mechanically lowered--and so close to the performers as to be able to focus on individual sweat beads, strands of hair and fingernails.

Each dancer's focus varies--deep, quiet interiority; attempts to glimpse something other than each other; close engagement, loving and erotic in its implications. The spiky, birdlike Kotze gazes upward a lot, Gries, more compact and intense, often looks elsewhere. But then they do regard each other, almost touch, touch and guide, use one body as another's support, or melt away together towards the floor. Subtle sounds--thunder? crashing waves? a distant train?--imply an unseen environment that holds these two, perhaps an imagined or remembered "outside" to this radically confining "inside." We don't know who they are, but we can infer how they are, how they might have been and how they might yet be.

Leaving them is not easy, but when the time comes and the window shade draws up to once again reveal a mundane city street, we're literally shown the door (by Bartosik) and given access to our checked coats and bags. We leave Kotze and Gries to themselves and their lives. For all we know, these two beautiful dancers could have been in that narrow room forever and will remain so.

Étroits sont les Vaisseaux continues through Saturday, April 30 with performances at 8pm and 9pm. Contact boxoffice@gibneydance.org to inquire about ticket availability and standing room. For other information, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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