We sit in makeshift bleachers, faces in darkness, weight shifting from thigh to thigh in anticipation. I close my eyes for what feels like seconds, and a light flashes from behind my lids. I open them.
A bearded man in white is projected on a wall over and over again, different dances to the same music. The lights are bright and flickering. The pictures move and slice. It is jarring. It is beautiful.
A woman lying on the ground is framed by small, sleeping lights. She does not move. Two dancers join the floor and move in response to the man on the wall. My focus shifts to them, and eventually the projection stops, and we are mesmerized by bodies joined in motion. They freeze—the ceiling lights dim, and string lights on the floor wake to illuminate the woman on the ground. This is a moment like the end of a fairytale. The woman opens her eyes, lifts her head, and arranges the lights around her body. Movements of a child waking from a strange dream. Then she lays herself down in her bed of lights, and they shut off.
Six dances, three dance companies: Jeff Docimo choreographs for Isodoc Dance Group; Anya Clarke and Mitsuko Verdery for Michiyaya Dance Company; and Teddy Tedholm for Tedted Performance Group. A showcase of three New York-based emerging choreographers. The DOC Series at the Center for Performance Research showcases such feats of the Brooklyn dance community. Every piece is different, yet they all fit immanently together. The first has a definite end before the second begins, yet the transition from one to the other is seamless. They barely stop to breathe.
There are stories to be found in the dances, however subjective our interpretations may be. One dance tells a story of complexity within a single person, of the facets of one personality, and of the conversations and losses that we experience within ourselves. It is performed in darkness, lit only with a single lamp set in the middle of the floor. Around it, three figures in black hover, swell together, inflate like a single lung, and pulse like the beat of a heart.
They dance amongst each other, flipping and flowing over and through one another like water. It seems impossible and effortless in the same moment. At one point, one member of the trio breaks off. She moves towards a corner of the room and is followed by one of the other dancers, who traps her with his body on the wall. The second dancer is saddened, defeated. There is pain in his movement and in the positioning of his neck and arms as he creates a cage around her. The final dancer follows them smoothly, facing the lamp towards them so that they cast a glowing shadow on the wall. The male dancer falls motionless, and his partner begins to crawl over him, slipping over his limbs and climbing over his body like a mouse on the bars of its cage. Incredibly strong and controlled, the male dancer stays perfectly still, even as one arm holds his partner’s entire weight.
The female dancer breaks free of her cage and leaves him planted in the corner. Her movements are sharp and angry as she makes her way across the room, but the last dancer stops her and pulls her back. The two of them have a moment of conversation with their bodies: They move with one another in what starts as an argument but turns toward understanding. They then pivot backward as to help the last member of their group, but he has crumbled entirely. It is too late, they’ve lost him.
The piece, entitled “Falten”, is performed by the Isodoc Dance Group, and choreographed by Jeff Docimo. Beautiful yet haunting, Docimo’s choreography has reached a level of dance beyond notes and steps. It is naked emotion.
There are moments when I am alone, when it feels as though no one is watching, that I too dance. I move and wiggle and imagine myself to be beautiful. My dancing inevitably ends as I catch sight of the awkward angle of my suspended limbs reflected in a window, and laugh. I am not a dancer. Dancing, it seems, is more than moving.
—Erika Peterson, Assistant Fiction Editor