11/11/2023 0 Comments Dreamie reviews![]() ![]() Your shipping amount will be available once you enter your country (you don’t have to complete the checkout). To see the shipping cost for your country, please add it to the cart and proceed to check out. Through Sunday at the Fisher Center at Bard College, free shipping applies to the following countries:Īsia: Malaysia, Singapore, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Philippines, Hong KongĮurope: Belgium, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Netherlands, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Switzerland, United Kingdom, Poland, Czechia, Iceland, Serbia, Denmarkĭue to limitations from our shipping company, all other countries will incur additional shipping charges between $5-$10 USD. There’s also the delight of imaginative artistry and choreographic craft, decisions that feel like discoveries - surprises, like those feet, that might make you smile. In “Nail Biter,” this unconscious imagery, exposed and disguised, carries the anxiety of compulsion. Instead, they appear as in a vivid dream, unexplained but not at all random, so there is a sense of design, even if unconscious. None of the possible antecedents are reproduced exactly. These associations might just be mine, though. Lafferty, who might be a choreographer stand-in, arranging the others, resembles Jennifer Beals in “Flashdance,” another role model for a dancer growing up in the ’80s. Jordan Demetrius Lloyd hints at Michael Jackson with his gloves, white socks and black shoes. But the other dancers keep suggesting the 1980s. Is the theatrical imagery related to that loss? Cloud’s precise motions draw on ballet, and she disappears through the hole in the curtain. Gill has dedicated it to her childhood dance teacher, Rose-Marie Menes, who danced with the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo and died in 2021. This dreamlike work invites dream analysis. What holds these pieces together, sustaining both suspense and direction, is mainly Jon Moniaci’s spooky score, feeding in organ tones, a frame drum, crashing objects, a choir. Some dancers leave and never return some show up late. The dancers’ motions might repeat but they rarely cohere into phrases. These worlds overlap, their characters largely separate but occasionally touching. Jennifer Lafferty appears in a white leotard and boots, Marilyn Maywald Yahel in sparkly hot pants and a crop top. But other costumes, by Baille Younkman, bring other associations. She rolls in on a battered piano, looking rather like Wednesday Addams in a black dress and three braids, one of which descends over her face. The dancer Maggie Cloud seems to come from that world. The atmosphere is ghosts-in-the-theater gothic. Here, the candle connects to Thomas Dunn’s scenic and lighting design, especially to curtains that partially descend and a ragged painted backdrop with a hole in the middle. She both exposes and disguises herself, as she did in her last work, “Pitkin Grove,” during which she dipped her topless torso into paint. Gradually, the rest of her appears: topless, covered in white paint, leaving a residue as she slides her body along the floor, holding a lighted candle. Gill also dances in the work, and the first parts of her to emerge are her bare feet they poke out from a wing before retracting, like those of the Wicked Witch of the East. This tension produces suspense, even though the action is so sparely distributed that a viewer can easily space out.īecause of that spareness, entrances are especially dramatic. The dancers give the sense that they must behave exactly as they do, but also that they don’t know why. Everything seems absolutely deliberate but also mysterious. Since her 2016 piece “Catacomb,” Gill has been developing a kind of pedestrian surrealism. Gill’s “Nail Biter,” which had its premiere here at the Fisher Center at Bard College on Friday, is a nail-biter in a peculiar sense. It’s an apt title for the latest work by the choreographer Beth Gill. Nail-biter: The phrase is vivid, evoking an agitated psychological state through a physical image that is both banal and disturbing. ![]()
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