ORDEALS WE CRAVE
Deborah Jowitt, Village Voice
Threshold
Nadine Helstroffer
At Rapp Arts Center
March 31 though April 2
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Nadine Helstroffer, French-born, has worked here with Sin Cha Hong, and like many of Hong’s dances, her fascinating Threshold hints at mysterious rituals whose purpose we can’t know. After a brief glimpse of three people bouncing up and down like agitated monkeys on a black shelf high above the stage, we watch a small crowd in rumpled white clothes roll very gradually toward the edge of the stage. Some slide inertly down a steep ramp to the performing area in front of the stage; others simply drop. We watch and wait; who is next? Plop. Inevitable as water sliding off a roof.
Blackouts separate discrete primal events: dancers (eight in all) erupt into the air, crash to the floor (Britt Whitton is astonishing; I imagine a gale blowing him into the steps); three people thrust their heads and arms through a hole in a cargo net hanging onstage; Helstroffer and Christine Zaepfel move in unison with wary, awkward grace-staring towards us. Philip Vercruyssen turns slowly on a high trapeze; later in the dance, he pulls Laura Bartolomeo up by the wrists to join him. Their duet is cramped, poignant. Her presence on the trapeze restricts the space, entails more danger, she looks less like an acrobat than a woman determined to come through an ordeal with honor. Philip Fraser’s variegated music sensitively shadows the changes in atmosphere, as does Susanne Poulin’s lighting design.
Near the end of the dance, Bartolomeo, Whitton, and Barbara Thatcher perform an expanded version of the opening monkey dance: perching on chairs close to us, toppling off, making the chairs jump and bang together, they reiterate in unruly ways the hear-see-speak-no-evil gestures we could barely discern during the opening.
These people (Caryn Heilman, Myunk Oak Rubin, and Dominique Vernin are the others) perform every gesture with intensity, whether is crumpling down, leaping up, or , on rare occasions, shooting a straight leg out into the air. However strange or disparate their actions seem to us, their absorption and their gravity make us believe that these rites may hold their curious world together, or prepare them for another.
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