Alyssa Alpine on Michelson's "Devotion"

Devotion Study #1--The American Dancer
by Alyssa Alpine, Culturebot, March 9, 2012

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)

Kinzel's responsible

Jon Kinzel's Responsible Ballet And What We Need is a Bench to Put Books On--curated by Sarah Michelson for The Kitchen--is a tasty bit for lovers of contemporary dance and its star performers. Vicky Shick, recovering from a fall, did not appear last night, but Kinzel, Hilary Clark, Jodi Melnick, Christopher Williams and promising newcomer Jeremy Pheiffer held everything together--not one of these folks duplicate any of the others or, for that matter, can anyone else in the dance-iverse duplicate them.

There aren't wings at the sides of The Kitchen's performance space, just one, smallish and dark partition--part of Kinzel's visual design--hanging in space. The piece begins when dancers scatter from behind this screen; when dancer return during the course of the piece, it amusingly hides everything but their legs. The bare, WYSIWYG space contains one other clever design element--a few long strips of masking tape. Yep. That's basically it. But really, it's fun when Williams rips the strips from the black wall and turns them three-dimensional. A little effort, a little act of down-to-earth alchemy. 

Responsible Ballet--free of overwhelming multimedia distractions--exposes its dancers and the arbitrary-seeming quirks of its movement. Kinzel favors spongey, stretchy, sometimes bizarrely distorted moves that shift and slither through positions that are unusually, continuously alive. This dancing writes across open space in an unknown or forgotten language--postmodern hieroglyphics.

In Kinzel's solos and duets, each dancer carries an elusive story of sorts. Melnick (with the big, intact valentine on her holey shirt) and especially Pheiffer carry the most distinct, resonant ones. Pheiffer's springy gyrations have a viscerally disturbing quality--like the first stirrings of seasickness--but I think something about him brings out the squirmy, sloshy-iness running through Responsible Ballet as a whole.

Clark, who has been more interestingly deployed, makes out less well than any of her colleagues here where it seems she serves merely as a blunt, undefined physical contrast. To be fair, that might not have been Kinzel's intention, but that is the effect. If Pheiffer writes with a fine Rapidograf, Clark wields a luxurious sable brush, but her hieroglyphics look all slash, splash and babble. And Kinzel has not added anything fresh to Williams' excellent track record.

Even so, these highly responsible and responsive dancers are well worth our venturing out to The Kitchen on some of this winter's coldest nights. But there's only one show left--tonight. Click here for ticketing.

Michelson's "Dover Beach"

Here's a link to my review of Dover Beach by Sarah Michelson for Dance Magazine.