Annique Roberts. Photo by Mohamad Sadek.

State of Darkness and the Internet of Dance

By Garth Grimball

Reproduction is beautiful. Reproduction is corrosive. The bonding of animals through sex to create new life is miraculous. Copying someone else’s intellectual property is unethical, illegal. The former is a welcoming of the new. The latter is a dissolution of what was new. Dance embraces the duality of reproduction more so than any other art form. How many bodies have inhabited Ailey’s Revelations or Petipa’s Swan Lake reproducing the steps with every performance? Yet unlike live theater and music, there is no artifact to claim as original, to defend as the primary source. Live dance is always making anew. And then, the internet.

From Oct 24 - Nov 1, the Joyce Theater livestreamed seven dancers performing State of Darkness, Molissa Fenley’s seminal 1988 solo dance to Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps. Solo dances are the de facto choreography within pandemic health guidelines, and the Joyce is the first presenter to reproduce an existing solo that dances at the center of the internet, “live” experience, and reproduction. I watched all 7 performances totaling 4 hours and 5 minutes.

Since its 1913 premiere choreographers have wrestled with Stravinsky’s symphonic beast. But the music is saved from oversaturation. Using rhythm over melody in storytelling, the score hasn’t been sacrificed to the gods of capitalism like Tchaikovsky or Vivaldi. No jingle to hawk holiday wares is born out of Le sacre’s polyphony. Fenley’s choreography is similarly familiar and entirely its own. For over forty years she has crafted her own style of movement that reflects her youth in Nigeria and Spain and her ascendancy in the downtown New York dance scene of the 1980s. Her choreography is her: energetic, thoughtful, complex. Movement you can easily put a name to, say a kick or an arabesque, acquires an inflection point or a change of force making it different and unique in Fenley’s vocabulary.

Michael Trusnovec. Photo by Mohamad Sadek.

The seven dancers, Michael Trusnovec, Jared Brown, Annique Roberts, Shamel Pitts, Lloyd Knight, Cassandra Trenary, and Sara Mearns, all have different training backgrounds which makes their relationship to the choreography unifying and not repetitive. Each dancer reproduces Fenley in the choreography. In every performance I see a different element of her and of the performer’s individuality. Like Woody Allen directing every male protagonist to perform him (minus the narcissism and sexual predation). Every dancer is in some way performing the dance and performing Fenley. The rare opportunity afforded by the internet to see 7 interpretations of one dance so close in time transcends the streaming of theater dance to an internet of dance. Like dances on TikTok or Instagram, the viewer can see the dance spread and deepen in the dancers’ bodies and on the medium, the screen, as it transforms body to body in real time. The solo becomes a pas de deux between each dancer and Fenley, balancing integrity and interpretation. As artist Hito Steyerl says, the “aura is no longer based on the permanence of the ‘original,’ but on the transience of the copy.” Dance, the most impermanent of the arts, reckons with transience as the pandemic requires a new mediated relationship with the viewer.

At the risk of reducing the awesome work and artistry to superlatives, each performer has standout qualities in interpreting and reproducing the solo. Trusnovec’s connection to the earth; Brown’s fluidity and storytelling; Roberts’s calm and expressive gestures; Pitts’s looseness and freedom in space; Knight’s internal force; Trenary’s precision; Mearns’s musicality and fire. State of Darkness removes the veneer of dance as effortless. The close-ups available in livestreaming highlight the sweat, the nostrils flaring, the rapid expansion of the rib cage. The camera as intermediary adds a heightened sense of physicality even as it flattens dimensions.

When the last note strikes and the dancer steps into a pool of light the curtain of the Joyce theater closes and opens for a silent bow. Each time I found myself clapping at the screen yearning to shout my enthusiasm from inside the theater. Inside the screen the seven faces are a collage of exhaustion, relief, gratitude. Mearns, the last performer, bowed and collapsed on the floor in tears. The Joyce, Fenley, and the dancers create a new experience of dance, a reproduction that doesn’t dissolve. To an empty theater and screens across the world the humanity of dance is on display.

State of Darkness at the Joyce is available to stream through Nov 7, 2020 at joyce.org. $12 per dancer.

Garth Grimball is a writer and dance artist based in Oakland, CA. He hosts the podcast Reference Desk and is co-director of Wax Poet(s).