These four guys: Lucy Guerin Inc at BAM Fisher

Here's the link to my DanceMagazine.com review of Lucy Guerin Inc in Guerin's Untrained--running now at BAM Fisher.

Keithley's opulent park

I followed Karinne Keithley down the rabbit hole of Montgomery Park, or Opulence, trying to make sense, until I realized that--as Keithley quotes William James--"the boundary-line of the mental is certainly vague." This multimedia performance isn't vague as much as it is poetically surrealistic and delicately laced with the exquisite opulence of Keithley's musical and movement aesthetics.

How bizarre to witness Lucy Guerin's stunning Corridor at BAC one night then hear two references to a burning insane asylum corridor in Keithley's piece the next afternoon. How bizarre to watch Keithley and Katy Pyle demonstrate a sequence of "Spinozan Calisthenics" (created by Sara Smith) then, later that evening, see Michelle Boulé, Miguel Gutierrez and Tarek Halaby demonstrate something that should really be called Hellaerobics in Gutierrez's outstanding Last Meadow at DTW. This has been a weird--if ultimately rewarding--weekend.

Keithley's show concludes its run at 7pm tonight at HERE Arts Center. Space is limited, but if tickets are still available, you can get them HERE or at 212-352-3101.

Note: My review of Gutierrez's Last Meadow will be featured in Dance Magazine, and I will let you know when that's available.

Guerin instructs at BAC

OMG! These dancers are doing two shows per night of this…?!

In Corridor--a roughly hour-long piece from 2008, given its US premiere at Baryshnikov Art Center--Lucy Guerin asks a lot of her performers, members of the Melbourne-based Lucy Guerin Inc. All we, her audience, have to do is sit there in two single rows of chairs flanking the long sides of a runway and tuck away our feet and our belongings, since dancers can scarily lunge our way or hurtle by very close to our toes. We do have to shift our gaze back and forth, seeking the next outbreak of imagery--which can feel strained--but if ever there were a dance in non-traditional theater space that kept viewers in their place, this is it. We start off with a distinct THEM-and-US feeling.

Occasionally, some dancers roll a light panel behind our chairs from one end of the room to the other. It's kind of an MRI experience, at least, visually; it doesn't quite achieve a full-on claustrophobic feel, and I don't know if Guerin intended it to do so. But it does give you a sense of being hemmed in and controlled by alien machinery you don't really grok.

At the sneakily-timed onset of the piece, one and gradually all of the six dancers--secretly embedded within the audience--answer ringing cellphones, rise and aimlessly stroll the corridor while conversing with their callers. All looks reasonably normal until one fellow's facial expressions, movements and gestures take on an odd cast that gets odder still. The Ministry of Silly Walks lives!

If the dancers' shoulders were hangers, their bodies would be suits of clothes waggling and flapping in strong gusts of wind.

One guy picks up a cordless mic and offers capsule descriptions of some facet of each dancer's appearance and moves: "She's wearing a little bit of lipstick. She's giving a kick to the side. His shirt is very stripey." This segues into pairings of one dancer with a talker who calls out instructions like--my favorite--"Do snake. Do serpent. Do snake. Do serpent." Guerin then experiments with having the partners in each pair mirror each other's movements.

A stream of little things spliced together with precision and creepiness, Corridor is totally abstract yet resonant with powerful, cartoonish imagery--like slapstick without contact, like wild rebounds from invisible sites of impact. The dancers' superior agility of motion and mood, and their physical abandon and courage, particularly in a few outrageous solos, will exhilarate and terrify you. And you're so close, why, when bodies slam to the floor, you feel it in your own bones, but you have to just sit there and take it.

The final segment, it seems to me, zooms the dancers out of the realm of the personal. A distorted voice from on high now issues the instructions, and these call for global and cosmic missions more appropriate to angels or supermen than men. One by one, the dancers drop the shell-like robes they'd donned and quietly leave the space.

It seems like death. Or it could be a refusal to engage with the instructions. Or maybe it's both. The lights go off, and we're left with only the space's glaring-red EXIT signs to stare at. Brilliant. The final instruction.

Corridor continues its BAC run tonight at 6:30 and 8:30 and concludes with a 5pm performance tomorrow, Sunday. Space is very limited. Call 212-868-4444 or purchase tickets online here.

Lucy Guerin Inc. will present a 2006 work, Structure and Sadness, at Dance Theater Workshop, October 1-3 (7:30pm). For information and ticketing, click here.