Gillen's Vim Vigor presents "FUTURE PERFECT" at Baruch

Jason Cianciulli and Emma Whiteley
of Vim Vigor Dance Company
in FUTURE PERFECT
(photo: David Bazemore)

I'll say this for choreographer Shannon Gillen: She's got wicked imagination. And you might want to think twice about going camping with her. Or taking a swig of whatever she's got in that thermos. I'll say that, too.

Anyway, VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY is running the New York premiere of Gillen's FUTURE PERFECT at Baruch Performing Arts Center. The premise is a wilderness trip that's as wild as they get, where this dance artist plays loose and fast with time, identity, sex, death--everything but taxes. Taxes you can do yourself. Leave the rest to Gillen and her un-matchable performers whose near-acrobatic skills give this roughly hour-long dance drama its wow power.

Hooking up with beer-swilling, shifty-looking strangers under the stars? To be avoided at all costs. But who, actually, are the dangerous ones? Everyone in the show and watching it will be saying the same thing: "Your guess is as good as mine." I only dare tell you that great care has been taken--with the set, the sound and the now normal, now eerie, now garish lighting--to give this landscape just the right combination of realism and pumped-up, laughable artificiality, which is to say, to make it a nightmare waiting to happen.

L-r: Martin Durov, Laja Field, Shannon Gillen,
Emma Whitely, Rebecca Diab and Jason Cianciulli
of VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY
(photo: David Bazemore)

The wonderful cast of Jason Cianciulli, Martin Durov, Laja Field, Emma Whiteley and company apprentice Rebecca Diab could have been recruited from (or might easily be recruited for) one of those online series we all love to binge watch. The only problem I see is the way Gillen's movement--rough handling, tumbling and whirling, with dancers sailing around and over fake boulders and one another--stretches to fill nearly every development in the piece. It's a hoot when you first see it, a holler when you see it again but, after a while, you might have seen it too much, and it veers close to looking like a gimmick.

Best to ignore the press release's claim that the characters "confront their place in the universe," and the piece "wrestles with our desperation for a spiritual sign and asks: What magic is left?" At what point in the making of FUTURE PERFECT were these ideas floated and, I wonder, at what point were they left to float right out to sea? Because I don't know that I see any of that here--or need to.

Concept, Direction, Writing, Set Design: Shannon Gillen

Choreography: Shannon Gillen in collaboration with VIM VIGOR DANCE COMPANY 

Sound Score: Martin Durov

Lighting Design: Barbara Samuels

Costume Design: Joseph Blaha

FUTURE PERFECT runs Thursdays-Saturdays at 7:30pm through February 11. For tickets and further information, click here.

Baruch Performing Arts Center

55 Lexington Avenue (enter 25th Street between 3rd and Lexington Avenues), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Shannon Gillen's Vim Vigor troupe premieres "Separati"

Shannon Gillen's Separati
(photos: Arnaud Falchier)

Separati enters the turbid psychic space of highway travel and anonymous companionship. Caught up at a midway point, five characters travel through the past, present and dark hallucinatory projections of the future. Stilled periods of waiting juxtapose wild physical bouts of surreal movement, as reality gives way to the imagination. What is the distance between where we have come from and where we want to go? Between what happens to us and who we are? Can the space between bodies and ideas ever be joined? And if not, can we exist in the middle ground of separation?

Separati--Shannon Gillen's hour of dance theater at Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center--left me winded and feeling pistol-whipped. I would have checked her Vim Vigor Dance Company for bruises and sprains, but I was too busy checking myself.

And its psychic space really is "turbid," as advertised. With its Edward Hopper lighting and its stark old phone booth isolated in the middle of nowhere, Separati strands its characters, and its watchers, in a nightmare between real life and the surreal. Unpredictable cacaphony--disembodied or channeled voices that taunt and mock; pop-up music, new and nostalgic; assortments of sounds--would be enough to make anyone want to claw her way back to wakefulness. But it's the choreography for the five characters--seemingly rootless travelers who hook up and entangle--that takes the greatest toll.

(photos: Arnaud Falchier)

Jason Cianciulli and Martin Durov portray two creepy men, endlessly controlling and abusive; Laja Field, Lavinia Vago and Emma Whiteley, the women caught in their magnetic force field. Separati might need to come with a trigger warning.

I'm not sure about Gillen's murky questions about "the space between bodies and ideas" and "can we exist in the middle ground of separation." All I can say is it would have been far better had these bodies, these human gyroscopes, never closed any separating gap. As hard to watch as it is, the action exerts punishing, diamond-making pressure on these performers, and they are absolutely there for that pressure.

Although Gillen herself boasts an extensive international career in performance and dancemaking, Vim Vigor is a young venture, just formed in 2015. Given the all-out dancing and acting on display in Separati--and Gillen's impressive direction--this troupe bears watching. Fortify yourself and go tonight or tomorrow at 7:30pm. For tickets, click here.

Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center
29 Jay Street (between John and Plymouth Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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