Elevator – by Alice Heyward

The already historic feel of the auditorium conjures the indelible mark of Pina Bausch’s iconic Café Müller, only instead of white spaghetti-strap nightgowns, the ensemble’s black, asymmetrically cut clothes heighten the austerity and drama of the reference, and the palpable sense of Tanztheater the piece invokes.
The choreography expands and morphs thick patterns of contemporary dance phrasing, with flying leaps, emphatic gestures, and whooshing exhales, the ensemble weaving group structures with the drama of the music’s accentuations.
Their dancing bursts, coils, unfolds, contracts, and floats, in contact with each other, directing its presentation toward the abyss beyond the fourth wall, the confines of their initial train carriage now exploded, movement catapulting into impassioned representations of displacement and “home”.

Blow Up – by Alice Heyward

There’s humour in the imagery. The blow-ups make formal arrangements — a ballet of jelly beans bobbing in diagonals — and they plop off the stage ledge like lemmings into the hall where we’re sitting in our own Cafe Müller arrangement of bar furniture.
Blow Up resolves by returning to its Tanztheater origins, with the dancers once again revealed in their black tatters, having journeyed through imaginative landscapes of diverse forms, both singular and collective, across different spatial systems and the emotivity they produce.
At once direct and abstract, the work offers a surprising dramaturgy of traditions in dialogue, speaking to experiences of displacement, replacement, and growth over time: people moving and making home between socio-cultural contexts, weaving relationships.
What inflates and deflates are modes of being in movement — the body as passenger, as mass, as individual — that reorient us through rupture.

La Playa – by Alishanee Chafe-Hearmon

La Playa, a multidisciplinary dance piece by Olga Rabetskaya premiered at New York Live Arts on Thursday February 19th. The piece begins with an air of dejection, as the audience settles, a woman in a dress crawls across the floor scrubbing at imaginary stains. Another performer sits facing away from us, seemingly a fellow witness to the spectacle about to take place. A moment of sonic foreshadowing is put forth – a  scene set to the sound of crashing waves, recalling the sound of inhaling and exhaling. As the audience becomes silent, dancers are added to the space: an angry cook, a smoking waiter, and a gardener. Each dancer represents one of the four natural elements (water, fire, air, and earth), their temperaments seemingly both parallel and contradictory to their physical translations. Both ambiguous and literal at once, La Playa displayed virtuosic movement set in a sentimental whirlpool of emotion and disaster.

Short skirmishes and mini dramas play out through Rabetskaya’s finely crafted duet and solo work. While steady basslines measure the dancer’s movement, highly technical dancers perform universal human emotions: joy, shame, love, disappointment. I find myself curious, what does it mean that the cook (fire) and the waiter (air) are fighting, or that the cleaning lady (water) and the waiter (air) share a tender slow dance? My conclusions remain opaque throughout the piece. The gardener (earth) maintains a sunny disposition, cheering up the other three with a basket full of coconuts, her energy juxtaposed with the others. The dancers beautifully embody characters that produce a raw empathy in the onlookers. Rabetskaya’s complex choreography is enhanced by the dancer’s technical prowess. The four energies pushing and pulling, offering contradictions and counterpoint, attempting equilibrium but never quite arriving there.

Suddenly, an urgent voice interrupts from the radio and announces a tsunami warning, urging the residents of “La Playa” to seek shelter immediately. The dancers ignore this warning, and continue complex synchronized floorwork.  The four elements seem at odds with each other, which leads me to wonder if true natural harmony might be a myth and reality something closer to chaos and a collective death wish?

There’s a nihilism to their blissful ignorance; the piece seems to be going somewhere with this metaphor. The tsunami ever closer, the dancers distract themselves while impending doom grows on the horizon. For a moment, the audience sees itself in the glimmer of a mirror, but no sooner than this illusion of reflection occurs, we are returned to the theater where natural disaster arrives as a sort of reckoning. Bright lights blind the audience as the stage goes dark and the sounds of crashing water, screaming, and collisions paint a portrait of destruction. Projections are displayed showing the dancers at a stormy shoreline, salt water splashing at their bodies in slow motion. We are plunged into the depths: sudden inundation, overflowing with wetness, drowning, lack of air, all lead to the next portion of the piece – a fertile plane for growth, reflection, and discovery.

We abandon narrative as this new realm is dominated by abstraction. Musicians flag stage right and left, and dancers lay out on striped towels miming with an imaginary object; playfulness leads the way in this so-called “afterlife.” Choreographic sequences echo wakes and eddies, the movement of water and air swirling and spiraling together. There is a viscosity to the movement, recirculating structures, a geometry of the body that flows in circular arcs. The dancers recall oceanic and atmospheric vortices, rotating whorls, and tidal synchronization. Musicians add textural layers with percussion instruments, violin, bass and the human voice. Live music interspersed with recorded tracks, dancers fall in and out of tempo. The singer lets out an animalistic cry and begins to pluck a jaw harp; something has begun, and it’s clearly the build-up to a grand finale. The musical crescendo in sync with the increasing energy of the dancers; they alternate between a ritualistic circular dance, a synchronized groove, and a group of chaotic pulsating bodies, recalling the floor of a dance club. A final build up leads to an explosion of resilience, joy, celebration, all ending in abrupt silence, the dancers frozen upstage, their silhouettes cast on a red backdrop.

Rabetskaya’s temporal design enhanced the surreal narrative. Her attention to set design elements created an atmosphere in which one could get lost. Her musical choices charmed the audience into a hypnosis. The dancers took flight, spun, and rolled in effortless execution of intricate sequences. This work took me on a journey of reflection and I continued to ask myself questions even after the applause ended. It stuck with me.