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Khecari Dance Theatre "The Waking Room"

By Laura Molzahn:

The genius-and challenge-of Jonathan Meyer's new piece (running this weekend, then next Wednesday through Saturday at the Co-Prosperity Sphere) is how thoroughly it creates and inhabits its own world. It's not fun to be in "The Waking Room" because it forces the viewer, like the three characters, into a space that feels infantile, crazy, or both. It’s not fun, but it is a tight, efficient, uniquely enlightening journey into the elemental.

Ever wonder what it's like to be the twitchy guy on the corner talking to himself? Watch this and you'll have a pretty good idea. But let's be honest: all on our own, even without this piece of dance theater, we can enter the grip of mind-altered moments: drunkenness, rage, paranoia, unbearable anxiety. In "The Waking Room" we're not entering a new and unfamiliar house. We're returning to a nightmarish place that used to be, or maybe still is, home.

To create the movement, Meyer stripped away the control that we usually exercise over impulsive motions responding to a possibly threatening environment. The recorded and live score, composed and performed by Christopher Preissing, is an overwhelming, layered barrage of found and manipulated sounds, some fleetingly recognizable: children's voices, a tolling bell, train noises, a melody played on a toy piano. But sometimes it just sounds like a house falling down around you, complete with crashing pots and pans, forever.

Though the movement is choreographed and exquisitely performed by the dancers, it tends to look involuntary. Spasms produce whirling leaps: the dancer looks like he's been caught up in a tornado, except that his hands and head twitch with a life of their own instead of just whipping around the torso. Unlike the usual movement motifs, the ones here are undancerly, disturbing: simian walking, fidgeting, arching the back as if seized by searing pain. Nearly every moment makes stability and control precarious, gifts that can be lost. The occasional vocalizing (there is no text) consists of yips, yells, gasps, squawks.

The structure of the hour-long piece comes from subtle shifts in the relationships between the characters. Michel Rodriguez and Meyer are at first dominated by Philip Elson, who seems older and much more controlled and controlling. But by the end the two "boys" appear to sit in judgment on the older man, who devolves into a kind of pain the boys don't seem to know.

The shifts in dominance are expressed most powerfully when the characters interact. As painful as it can be to watch each individual's lonely tics and spasms, it's worse when they touch. In one early sequence, Elson approaches Rodriguez with stealthy touches that might be tender but that verge into coercion. Later Elson calms the manic Meyer by placing a hand on his head, then forces him to the floor. By the end, though, a tableau in which Elson "comforts"-and subordinates-the two boys suddenly reverses emotional direction. In the moving final scene, the older man simply sits alone and stares, just once closing his eyes and slowly shaking his head.

Each dancer has a very different physicality from the others. Elson generally stares in a threatening or predatory way, or he looks bored and languishing, held upright by his cane. He’s the character most likely to give in to gravity, to slither and list. Meyer often closes his eyes or flicks them sideways; his violent motions seem to originate from within. By contrast Rodriguez seems both freer and more alert to the world outside himself. At one point he sits rigid, turning his head birdlike, maybe tracking bugs with his gaze-when he suddenly stands, it's from the force of his looking, not his volition.

Strong design helps create the world of "The Waking Room." Iris Bainum-Houle's fussy, frothy costumes (based on the decadent Incroyables of postrevolutionary France) contrast sharply with the blank-slate gallery setting and Christopher Furman's sleek kinetic sculptures of bird wings and human heads. Though unlike, both designs are distancing, creating an otherworldly place-an effect enhanced by Julie Ballard's harsh, highly directed and dramatic lighting.

Reviewed by Laura Molzahn on 09/11/2009 at 12:46 PM