![\"Dave](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/03\/AJ-singers-140225_Kimberly_Bartosik_003.jpg\")
<\/a>Dave Ruder and Gelsey Bell sing in Kimberly Bartosik’s You are my heat and glare<\/em>. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n A lighting designer and a choreographer walk into a bar and. . . . No this is not a way to begin, especially if a joke doesn\u2019t ensue; instead, the sentence announces a life-and-art collaboration that more likely began backstage.<\/p>\n Kimberly Bartosik, the choreographer, and Roderick Murray, the lighting designer, have collaborated on a number of works, but in none of them has their partnership been so intimately portrayed as in the first section of Bartosik\u2019s You are my heat and glare. <\/i>The title comes from poet Anne Carson\u2019s long poem \u201cThe Anthropology of Water,\u201d and the piece\u2019s three duets explore the forces of desire and frustration that lick at the edges of a relationship until they burn into it, as well as the sweet harmony existing between lovers who are perfectly attuned.<\/p>\n Composer-singer Gelsey Bell and singer Dave Ruder (also credited as an arranger) begin and end You are my heat and glare<\/i> and also divide its two darker episodes. Already singing, the pair lead some of us up the stairs at New York Live Arts, where, along with those audience members who have arrived by elevator, we file into chairs and onto cushions in the large third-floor studio. \u201cLove is a mystery inside this walking\u201d is the opening, oft-repeated sentence that Bell and Rudner sing in beguiling harmony as they pace around the perimeter of the space. They also conclude the evening by coming from behind the audience, singing again. This time, I catch other words. \u201cWhat can I withstand?\u201d rhymes with \u201cwater in my hand.\u201d\u00a0 In the peaceful middle of the work, they stand face-to-face, holding a small, bright-colored concertina between them. They chant a conversation about a journey, a road, retracing their steps; he pulls and pushes evenly; she presses buttons, and the instruments breathes two soft tones.<\/p>\n In the dark at left, Roderick Murray aims his light at Kimberly Bartosik. Photo: Yi-Chun Wu<\/p><\/div>\n The positioning of Bell and Ruder\u2019s duets suggests that the good days predominate in You Are My Heat and Glare<\/i>, or, at any rate, triumph over struggle. And such struggle. The initial singing ends with a flash of light, a blackout, and the reappearance of the single beam. It\u2019s the size of a large flashlight, and it\u2019s being wielded by Murray (although it\u2019s too dark to see him clearly). With it he searches, explores, caresses, intimidates, and challenges Bartosik, who, in her black clothes, is visible mostly as a pale face and a white wig. At first, she\u2019s marooned on Murray\u2019s power source\u2014a tangled nest of orange electrical wires. The contrast between the surrounding darkness and the insidious ray that Murray runs along Bartosik\u2019s leg is extreme, alarming. She is negotiating however\u2014clamping a foot down on the length of cord that her partner stretches up on a diagonal, and gathering the mess of wire around her like a tutu as she stares up into the light he holds just above her head.<\/p>\n The duet takes shape as a compendium of moments in a relationship\u2014each defined by light. Murray enshrines the seated Bartosik (her wig now off) beneath a small tepee made of fluorescent tubes and lays two more to fence him away from her. She stands in the center of the room and watches as he circles her slowly, making her shadow on the side and back walls grow and shrink. Is he stalking her or helping us to see her in all her aspects? He backlights her as she advances toward us, making big, slow dance movements. There\u2019s a startling moment when he\u2019s crouching on the floor, and she falls backward across his lap. And in an oddly jarring sequence, he\u2014maneuvering around her on the floor\u2014puts objects into her hand; they turn out to be barrettes for her to pin her hair back with before she moves among five little lamps that he has laid out on the floor like a garden. Once, when she briefly has control of a light, she points it at him like a gun.<\/p>\n<\/a>