Body under the sheets: That’s how kids summon ghosts. John Jaspers‘s latest dance “Visitation” begins.
Naturally for a film made during a pandemic, “Visitation” has death in mind. The stage at New York University’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts, where the work premiered this weekend, is supported by a translucent scrim with a draped opening in the center and a triangular portal to the other side. there is.
Soon, the body under the seat (Doug LeCourt) is gone, replaced by Cynthia Coppe and Tim Bendernagel. , sloppily posing. His Bendernagel standing is leaning against the side wall, his face not touching the wall.
It’s an apt symbol of the dance as a whole, artistically approaching the edge, leaning toward camp, kitsch, overwhelming emotion, and ecstasy, but without much touch. I slowly lifted my shirt to expose my stomach. Is this an exposure of vulnerable flesh or a come-on? Image of the sick or illegal? Is it the pose of the suffering person or the pose of the blessed person? Not only does he seductively pull his hand through his hair, but he stretches it into the air as if communicating with a higher power.
The youthful charm of these distinct dancers (whom Jasperse credits as a performance collaborator) and the meticulous compositional finesse of the choreography — full of symmetry and crisscrossing lines, looping leaps. and controlled even when pushing towards a turn — “visitation” is beauty as it is with death. Perhaps with the death of beauty, or, in the words of Wallace Stevens, with the death of beauty’s mother.
Soundscapes by Hahn Rowe charge the action with static industrial hum explosions, accelerated bounces of dropped objects, sounds between breaking glass and fire. But three times these poltergeist his noises are exchanged for orchestral music by Wagner.
At its center is nothing less than the prelude to Tristan and Isolde, the richest mixture of sex and death. Accompanied by a ghostly duet from LeCours and Bendernagel. I barely touch it at first. Bring the back of your hand down to your leg and pass your arm through the gap created by your opponent’s arm. This is incorporated into loose, coupled tumbling that is strangely dematerialized, like a version of contact improvisation whose goal is to disperse rather than share weight. As Wagner swells, they roll on the ground forever from here, like lovers in a wave.
At this point, the lighting on Stamp Lesnar, which is normally white, turns purple. In the previous scene, Bendernagel and Koppe are lacing Lecoeur. He holds his string in his mouth as the maypole circles around him like his dancer, or like someone tying someone to the stake. After they leave, Lecoeur tries to move, his tottering dance becoming more free as he loosens his ties, this time walking another line between slapstick and transcendence.
And so it goes. To the narration of what sounds like someone recounting a near-death experience, the corpse under the seat returns, this time with lights. There are more children’s games and spiritualist tricks. The rigging raises the seat, and in front and behind it dancers play with shadows, shapeless shadows with extra auras and penumbras.
Wagner joins in the climax as the duet reprise becomes a trio. The intertwining perpetual motion of both, the quality of the Mobius strip, along with all other associations of those sounds, match and resist Wagner’s infinite ridges. Since it is a seance, a “visit” does not summon a spirit. dance on the edge