Tere O’Connor’s unwavering vision of togetherness apart
LEAVING THE THEATER immediately after Tere O’Connor’s Rivulets, I distinctly felt that I experienced just seen a dance by Tere O’Connor. That could possibly sound clear, but it’s not one thing you can say about each choreographer—that their operate feels unmistakably theirs. With the rupture of the pandemic between O’Connor’s final key venture (Long Run, 2017) and this a person, the continuity of his aesthetic struck me as each reassuring and surreal, a reminder that whilst so significantly has modified, some men and women, somehow, have managed to hold carrying out their detail.
When I believe of a Tere O’Connor dance, I assume of multiplicity, flourishing, layering: images submerged or proposed as properly as plainly found. I believe of movement invoking many meanings at at the time, irreducible to any singular interpretation, and disparate routines coexisting like parallel trains of believed. I assume of a soundness of composition and dancers dancing total out, not just physically exerting on their own but excavating intricate inner worlds.
Lush and enigmatic, Rivulets has all of that. It also has a musical rating by O’Connor, who has often collaborated with the composer James Baker above his forty-yr vocation but listed here normally takes seem design into his personal arms. New to this undertaking, far too, are a lot of members of the marvelous forged of eight: Wendell Grey II, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Jordan Morley, Mac Twining, and Jessie Younger, who be part of returning dancers Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, and Emma Judkins.
The perception that no time had passed also brought with it for me a whisper of disappointment: a wish for some better indicator that it had, some remarkable swerve in a new way. If anything ways that in Rivulets, it’s the aliveness of the dancers’ collective existence, their discovery of a fresh new team dynamic. The electrical power of that however-unfolding approach infuses the dance.
In the studio-theater of Baryshnikov Arts Center—which introduced Rivulets with Danspace Task about two weeks in December—the performers all took the phase with each other and remained there right up until the end, resting on the periphery at occasions but in no way exiting. Their bearing witness to one a further heightened the feeling of a official still intimate ritual taking shape before us. Audience associates sat along two sides of the area (riverbanks occur to intellect), looking at the exact piece from reverse angles and, most likely less consciously, looking at each individual other look at.
Interrupting our preshow chatter, the lights went down as the solid entered in the dim, then went up all over again on a putting tableau: two chains of bodies cascading alongside the flooring, joined head to foot, every single flowing from a single of two dancers (Cuyjet and Dworman) seated on a bench. Heralded by dissonant horns, this opening image brimmed with contradictions. Were being individuals on the flooring in repose or distress? Luxuriating or defeated? Postures erect, Cuyjet and Dworman appeared practically victorious: Was their ease at the expense of, or in assist of, all those who lay at their toes? Or was this arrangement of bodies merely an architectural construction, a lovely form?
As if stirring from a desire, those people on the floor sat up and appeared about. Out of this awakening emerged the initial of many solos, Twining threading supplely by means of place in a extensive-sleeved emerald gown. (Reid Bartelme designed the sober but whimsical costumes in a palette of greens, browns, and bluish grays, the colors of earth and h2o.) From group configurations, far more solos, duets, and trios bubbled up, momentary focal points gestures from these scaled-down units occasionally rippled to those people on the outskirts, drawing the ensemble again alongside one another.
In trying to keep with the title, aquatic motifs launched by themselves: arms snaking overhead like waves (most likely the most literal) piano compositions reminiscent of hurrying h2o. So did flickering allusions to ballet classicism and its folk-dance roots—or at least that’s what I noticed. (O’Connor’s operate, open up-ended as it is, prompts you to question these types of particular associations as before long as you make them.) A person second referred to as to intellect Matisse’s The Dance an additional, Nijinsky’s Rite of Spring yet another, the processional pomp of a story-ballet wedding day scene. The tunes shifted frequently between modes and moods—now foreboding, now serene—and the dancing adopted go well with, even though the function managed a wholeness, in handle of its numerous restless and elusive components.
At occasions, all of the dancers would retreat to the perimeter of the stage, experiencing a person yet another from opposite sides. In this way, O’Connor performed subtly with standpoint at a specified level, what I experienced perceived to be the dance’s “front” appeared to improve. In the exact same immediate, I grew to become intensely aware of the audience users across the place: my reflection.
Inside of these more substantial structures, every performer’s individuality shone by way of, from time to time in the quietest specifics: a smile creeping across Judkins’s encounter, a furtive glance from Morley. Lloyd projected an easy heat and, along with Gray in their mirroring duet, a tenderness the luminous Younger exuded determination. Cuyjet and Dworman reemerged as a little something like leaders in the close, at after susceptible, assertive and looking, both with each other and by yourself.
Rivulets closed with the dancers arranged in rows, crossing back and forth in facet-to-side actions that became front-to-again pivots, a final change of orientation. But even in gentle of the work’s fullness, I observed myself startled when it was above, not all set for it to close. I’m nonetheless not confident if I was just wholly entranced, or waiting for a little something more—a deeper plunge into the unknown—from a grasp so sure of his craft. To draw from the classes of the dance: probably each.
— Siobhan Burke
Rivulets ran from December 7 to December 17 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York.
