From the first moments of the Gibney Company’s Up Close program in New York Live Arts, the group’s superpower is apparent: its strong and versatile dancers, performers who seem to be physically capable of anything. Since reinventing itself last year – with a shift towards presenting works commissioned by various choreographers, rather than those of its founder and artistic director, Gina Gibney – the company seems to be both filling a gap and more of the same. replicate in American contemporary dance.
The gap: stable employment and resources for dancers and choreographers within a corporate structure. (Jobs!) The more-of-the-same: choreography that doesn’t always do justice to the dancers’ talents.
In the current season, a triple bill of new works opening Tuesday, the most inspiring contributions come from Rena Butler — the group’s inaugural choreographer and standout dancer herself — and Yin Yue, the founder of the New York-based YY Dance Company. The last and longest work, Gustavo Ramírez Sansano’s “To the End of Love,” about online dating, showcased that all-too-common phenomenon of great dancers giving their all in the service of not-so-great choreography.
In her ambitious and carefully curated “Re/Build/Construct (Part I)” Butler takes cues from Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” to explore how external structures shape internal landscapes and social dynamics. Recorded passages of the text, which become increasingly distorted as the piece progresses, bookend and accentuate Darryl J. Hoffman’s electronic score that builds tension. Resembling wind-up dolls in their robotic yet elastic movement, six dancers deftly manipulate the walls of Tsubasa Kamei’s set. These lightweight panels start out in the shape of a house, but break apart to create other types of borders and fencing.
Jesse Obremski, in an early solo, is especially eerie in his puppet-like physicality, an uncanny hollowness that possesses his eyes and limbs. As they rearrange their world, sparring and conspiring with each other, the dancers periodically burst into distorted, frustrated speech that feels less fully realized and integrated than other aspects of the work. Movement is the most efficient and expressive language here, all the way to its dramatic climax, with the mighty Jie-Hung Connie Shiau trapped within the walls of the reconstructed house – safe shelter turned into captivity – and finally breaking through.
Yin’s ‘A Measurable Existence’, performed Tuesday by Obremski and Jake Tribus, opens on quieter ground, an apparently calm duet. Still, it takes a sharp and satisfying turn when part of the grid of light falls down, cutting across the room, casting the dancers in a harder glow, revealing a more sinister side to their relationship. (Asami Morita designed the lighting, which continues to mirror or direct the dancers’ energies.) Fluid and intricate collaborations take the duo through phases of tenderness and distance. Yin allows them to find detailed and surprising levers, like a shin bone nestled in a hip crease, while balancing between a sort of symbiosis and separateness, being between one and two.
While not exactly groundbreaking, “A Measurable Existence” said more about the complexities of relationships, with far less, than Ramírez’s “To the End of Love,” a 28-minute critique of online dating and its alienating effects. Sheets of paper with dating profile quips and confessions – “makes dinner naked”, “I have two kids” – cover the floor. Eight dancers wade through these pages, holding them up as they walk across the stage, sometimes stopping to share a flirtatious or longing dance, before being distracted by other love interests. (A cast member was missing on Tuesday, which could explain why some parts felt unfinished.) Ramírez delivers a similar message time and time again. While it may be intentional, it’s a bit too much like swiping.
Gibney Company
See you Saturday at New York Live Arts, gibneydance.org.