{"id":3870,"date":"2015-12-22T15:45:23","date_gmt":"2015-12-22T20:45:23","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=3870"},"modified":"2015-12-22T15:45:23","modified_gmt":"2015-12-22T20:45:23","slug":"dancing-down-to-the-bone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2015\/12\/dancing-down-to-the-bone\/","title":{"rendered":"Dancing Down to the Bone"},"content":{"rendered":"

luciana achugar premieres An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"(L

(L to R): Rebecca Wender, Jennifer Kjos, and luciana achugar in achugar’s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love<\/em>. Photo: Scott Shaw<\/p><\/div>\n

It\u2019s November, 2006, and I\u2019m sitting on one of the highest carpeted risers in St. Mark\u2019s Church watching Luciana Achugar\u2019s Exhausting Love. <\/em> Suddenly one of the performers (Hilary Clark) works her way toward me and my companion and wedges herself between us. Other cast members are also bridging the audience-performer divide. Most spectators stare straight ahead; that\u2019s where the performance is supposed to take place, right? Hmm. . . .<\/p>\n

It\u2019s April, 2014, and I\u2019m entering New York Live Arts\u2019 black box theater to see Achugar\u2019s Otro Teatro<\/em>. The line moves slowly. That\u2019s because an almost completely shrouded figure is kneeling in the doorway, kissing the left foot of each entering patron. It is the choreographer.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s December, 2015, and\u2014perhaps because,\u00a0 a) I\u2019m late arriving for Achugar\u2019s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love<\/em>, b) I\u2019m a critic, and c) I\u2019m almost the only person in the Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center with gray hair\u2014I\u2019m given a chair. Almost all the other spectators sit on the floor, leaning against the studio walls or forming clusters to be stepped into or surrounded by the performers.<\/p>\n

\"Molly

Molly Lieber and luciana achugar in achugar’s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love.<\/em>\u00a0 Photo: Scott Shaw<\/p><\/div>\n

The adventurous, thoughtful Uruguay-born choreographer (who now lower-cases the initial letters of her name) has been pursuing two related missions during the two decades. One, obviously, is to query and subvert the \u201cthird wall\u201d of traditional theater in order to induce kinesthesia in the audience. She wants, I think, to make our own bodies respond viscerally to what she is showing us. In a short talk she delivered during her 2008 The Sublime in Us<\/em>, she urged us like a well-intentioned therapist (I\u2019m paraphrasing here) to turn off our brains (meaning their intellectual, objective function) and think with the brains in our butts. (I\u2019m glad she moved past that approach.)<\/p>\n

achugar is concerned with the body in ways that most dancers ignore or repress. Her mission statement for Otro Teatro <\/em>and its \u201cepilogue\u201d says, in part \u201cTo give our body their voice back, with a practice of pleasure; to practice growing a body as one would grow a plant; a utopian body; a sensational body; a connected body. . .with a brain that melted down to the flesh, the blood, the bones. . . .\u201d That meltdown, that return to a kind of primality, is what she hopes we will not only see, but experience.<\/p>\n

Some of achugar\u2019s previous works have been darkly mysterious\u2014witchy even, and elements in An Epilogue<\/em> hint at that territory, as do the subtitles of its four parts:\u201cTrue Love,\u201d \u201cPraying,\u201d \u201cUnraveling,\u201d and \u201cSpellcasting.\u201d However the darkness in this piece evokes not only primal rituals, but the nightclub darkness that hides secrets yet is often suffused with vividly colored and patterned lights (lighting designer: Madeline Best). That one wall is mirrored amplifies the effects.<\/p>\n

\"Molly

Molly Lieber and Michael Mahalchicjk in luciana Achugar’s new work. Photo: Scott Shaw<\/p><\/div>\n

The music also evokes a club atmosphere. Expert sound engineer Peter Jacobs (surrounded by more cartons of LPs than he could possible play in one performance) mans a series of turntables. Slipping records in and out of their sleeves, segueing a tune on one disk into a track on another, overlapping them, messing with them, he keeps the disco beat throbbing through a wealth of transformations.<\/p>\n

Most of the time, the eight dancers work at pulling that beat out of their inner card catalogue of movements. Focus on any one of them (achugar, Oven Barnoy, Shantelle Jackson, Nikima Jagudajev, Jennifer Kjos, Molly Lieber, Michael Mahalchick, or Rebecca Wender), and, if they\u2019re on their feet, you\u2019ll almost always see that person doing the familiar step-stamp that often marks time on a dance floor; the knees pulse, and the stamping foot rebounds, so that the feeling, although grounded, has a lift to it. The dancers\u2019 hips may sway, their upper bodies swing and shrug; there\u2019s no end to what those unstopping feet can power.<\/p>\n

They\u2019ve risen from among the spectators or been prowling around the room before the doors are closed. In the beginning, dimly lit, they work in a cluster, stepping to the beat, turning. (I think briefly of protons and electrons swimming in a nucleus); they assume a common direction and travel toward it. At some point, they hang onto each other, bending over as they go. Eventually the clump spreads out and a task in which they copy one another develops. All this time, upward-aimed lamps on the floor turn the walls purple.<\/p>\n

\"(L

(L to R): Oren Barnoy, luciana achugar (masked), Shantelle Jackson, Molly Lieber, Rebecca Wender, Nikima Jagudajev, and Michael Mahalchick. Photo: Scott Shaw<\/p><\/div>\n

As An Epilogue <\/em>progresses, you can note themes and movements that echo or build upon ones in Otro Teatro <\/em>and other achugar works. One is shiny fabric. Gleaming silver and gold garments are removed and tossed aside or transferred to others while all are still dancing. Occasionally, one of the shirts is pulled up by its wearer to cover his\/her face. For a long time, achugar\u2019s hip motions cause her tights to slide down; eventually she pulls herself free of them. As in The Sublime is Us<\/em>, a dancer (both Wender and achugar the night I attended) dances nose-to-nose with her mirror image. In another retrospective move (achugar performed it countless times in her 2006 Exhausting Love<\/em>), a dancer gets down on all fours (forearms and knees, hands and feet, etc) and undulates her spine in unmistakably sexual ways\u2014sometimes traveling as she goes (if she is naked, you see her buttocks opening and closing rhythmically).<\/p>\n

Inevitably, over the two-plus hours, the dancers visibly tire; they\u2019re slick with sweat, burned down. The lights goad them\u2014turning green or red or dancing via mirror balls that throw discs of light on the walls. Jacobs\u2019s music is unrelenting. As the dancers pick their way through the crowd, they seem to want to engage more spectators. They surround one man sitting on the floor and doing his own sympathetic dance; you can see his feet flipping in time with the music as they crowd in, then move on. Two audience members (dancers), then a third are moved to get up and join the cast, but they haven\u2019t practiced the stamina needed for what comes to resemble a Depression-era dance marathon, and they bow out after a while. At one moment, I thought that achugar could barely continue to lift her feet, but she kept going.<\/p>\n

\"luciana

luciana achugar’s An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love<\/em>. (L to R): Molly Lieber, Nikima Jagudajev (supine), luciana achugar, and Jennifer Kjos. Photo: Scott Shaw<\/p><\/div>\n

The performers engage with one another more often late in the piece. Jackson comes down from a box she\u2019s been standing and supports Lieber, who is arching perilously far backward. In the evening\u2019s bit of surprise virtuosity, Lieber, rolling on the floor with Kjos, adroitly hooks with her feet a black tutu that Wender has tossed aside earlier and back-somersaults with the mess of black net riding high. And sometimes, they ignore the music-driven foot action or minimize it. For quite a while, Jagudajev stands amid some spectators making large, smooth, winging gestures with her arms.<\/p>\n

On and on the valiant performers go. A few spectators leave fairly early; others trickle out. (Are they tired? Bored? Offended? Do they have a late date?) Many of those remaining recline, prop themselves up on an elbow, lean on a friend, slide down the wall a little. I realize only later, that I haven\u2019t parsed the evening into its four sections. Are we in \u201cSpellcasting\u201d at around the two-hour mark? I sense a change, perhaps an ending, when many of the dancers have made it into the center of the space and are, most of them, lying down.<\/p>\n

Suddenly, I am very tired. Is this a sign that kinesthesia has been achieved\u2014at least a little bit? Maybe. I unaccountably do what I\u2019ve done only once in my life. I look at my husband and say, \u201cshall we go?\u201d And we slip out the back door.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m hoping that someone who stayed the course will (please?) post a comment or shoot me an e-mail telling me how An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love <\/em>ended\u2014 on this night or any other. I\u2019d like to know. This review needs its own epilogue.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

luciana achugar premieres An Epilogue for OTRO TEATRO: True Love. It\u2019s November, 2006, and I\u2019m sitting on one of the highest carpeted risers in St. Mark\u2019s Church watching Luciana Achugar\u2019s Exhausting Love. Suddenly one of the performers (Hilary Clark) works her way toward me and my companion and wedges herself between us. Other cast members […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3871,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[199,1],"tags":[1878,1877,1879,1133,1876,1874,1367,1873,1205,1875,1872,1871],"class_list":{"0":"post-3870","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-postmodern-views","8":"category-uncategorized","9":"tag-agnes-varis-performing-arts-center","10":"tag-gibney-dance","11":"tag-jennifer-kjos","12":"tag-luciana-achugar","13":"tag-madeline-best","14":"tag-michael-mahalchick","15":"tag-molly-lieber","16":"tag-nikima-jagudajev","17":"tag-oren-barnoy","18":"tag-peter-jacobs","19":"tag-rebecca-wender","20":"tag-shantelle-jackson","21":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3870"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3877,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3870\/revisions\/3877"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3871"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3870"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3870"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3870"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}