by Martha Sherman
RoseAnn Spradlin’s “Y” is a dense, sprawling work for an octet of dancers whose power, balance, and connection weave the show together. The world premiere was the culmination of New York Live Arts’ Randjedlovic/Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist program, a two year salaried grant whose comprehensive generosity makes all the difference for mid-career artists at the top of their game.
As the work opened, the dancers cascaded down the aisles of the theater before spilling onto the stage. Like a furiously boiling pot, they exploded in a silent pas de huit. The cast moved in and out of pairs and trios in the tight upper right corner of the stage, tangling in quick, sharp postures. A human puzzle in continuous motion, the energy seemed inexhaustible.
The opening scene was silent, except for the footfall on stage and increasingly audible panting, both amplified by microphones that were set around the floor and overhead. All attention was on the complexity of thick, dense motion; it was hard to keep track of the bodies. Legs slid under torsos; arms and backs wove together shifting the weight of two, three or four dancers as they slid over and around multiple partners. In one especially beautiful construction, four bodies were almost horizontal to the floor, each posed differently, as a fifth dancer balanced on top with his leg extended in a sharp wide angle. Although some version of that sculpture was repeated several times during the performance, it was never clear how the dancers managed not to tumble from the gravity of their assembled weight. The scene went on and on, longer than it seemed possible to remember moves this quick and compacted. The dancers’ bodies remembered, and hit every note.
Although “Y” was built on the collective, the dancers’ individuality emerged. Ainesh Madan found himself standing center-stage, alone as the others faded away to form trios of sentries on the bare stage. He anchored them, and the mass of bodies briefly became a colony with a center. Those moments served as pivots into new patterns, new scenes.
The dramatic lighting also helped. Roderick Murray’s lighting design looked simple at first, primarily a large U-shaped arc of lamps overhead, but Murray found ways to turn the raw stage into zones, like interior territories: sometimes harshly bright, sometimes so deeply shadowed that the bodies were only seen in silhouette. Periodic blackouts gave additional shape to the building dynamic of the piece.
Whenever the lights cut out, the dancers came back with some new angle – sometimes, literally, turning the movement patterns in a 90° shift, as if the stage under them had rotated. Sometimes the shift was a ratchet up in the ferocity of the movement. When Claire Westby first angled in a sharp downward “V” in the opening mash, she used that to launch into sliding partnerships; by her second, third, or fourth “V” later in the piece, the movement had its own identity, and her thrust into that shape belonged only to her.
Each dancer had their own moments. Tall, stately Thomas Welsh-Huggins moved in huge strides across the stage as his body shivered from his shoulders through his back and hips. He also incorporated acrobatic flips in his travels.
In a scene that bisected the work, the performers began to run, singly then with others adding in, jogging a boundary around the dancers still in the center, building to a crescendo whirlpool of racing energy. As others shifted their pace and moved in and out of the scene, Connor Voss calmly pounded an elegant loping stride around them all, never changing his pace, never stopping. By the time the rest stood panting in the center, Voss still circled them, relentlessly.
Finally Welsh-Huggins tackled Voss in a silent cry of “Enough,” clinging tightly to force Voss to stop. It was Voss, though, who controlled this moment, as he shifted that embrace to one that was – in a moment both startling, and unsurprising – entirely sexual, literally pulling the back of Welsh-Huggins’ pants down to caress him. Voss also astutely costumed the work, putting the dancers in combinations of loose underwear-like tops and bottoms, all revealing, all easy on and easy off.
As the dancers found more sexual – and violent – energy in their shifting postures (many of them familiar moves from earlier scenes), Voss and Welsh-Huggins left the stage. Voss returned naked, walked to the back of the stage and, literally started climbing the walls. Welsh-Huggins, naked as well, joined him, and hoisted Voss up on a shoulder to reach higher on the wall. The others dancers now writhed in connections and patterns, most having pulled off at least some of their costume. The physical exposure of the dancers, peeling off layers for each other and the audience, was an unsubtle, but entirely effective, metaphor.
Throughout “Y,” the dancers inhabited a hive where each body had moments of power and resonance, but no scene was complete without every participant in full motion. That kind of connected dependency can happen only with unhurried rehearsal, experimentation, and trust-building, revising and building work over time.
Spradlin has used the two years of this generous residency to build a powerful work with her stage-filling cast. In addition to a glorious showcase for the talents of Spradlin and her collaborators, “Y” demonstrates the way sustained support for art brings riches to us all.
Copyright © 2018 by Martha Sherman
“Y” – RoseAnne Spradlin
New York Live Arts
New York, NY
September 27, 2018
Cover: Connor Voss in “Y.” Photo © Maria Baranova.
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