by Leigh Witchel
To Create a World: The name of Andrea Miller’s new dance suggested something primordial. At the opening of the hour-long work, the stage was hidden by white fabric stretched across the front as a scrim. A body, invisible to us, pressed against it like a membrane. Gary Reagan, tall, blond and impossibly thin, writhed and squirmed out from the bottom. Just as it became clear he was naked, the lights cut out and the scrim fell to the floor.
Boschian vignettes of an alien, hostile land followed as the three men and four women in the cast came and went. Tones and feedback from Will Epstein’s score led into a thrashing opening quintet. The lights went down to come back up on Reagan on the ground, his legs up and askew like gnarled driftwood. Beside him, one of the women distorted her postures; her belly jutted out or her back arched. Distortion is at the core of Miller’s style; another solo later on featured the arms and torso hypo and hyperextended.
Reagan got up, vibrating, then lay on the woman, and they seemed to peck at one another like birds. Another quintet entered; marching in slow motion into an uncertain and smoky landscape. David Maurice and Haley Sung oozed out, draping over one another. He spun and threw her; when he lay down she swam on his upraised feet.
Every element of the dance felt seamless. The costumes by Jose Solis were simple; easy to pull on and off so color changes could mark off chunks of the work into sections. Props were used sparingly; a plastic tarp rotated to bring one person on and then pull another off in a hallucinatory segue, like episodes in a dream. Epstein’s score moved from quiet piano to surf to loud roars, dissolving from movement to movement.
After the group jumped as if in an obstacle course, “To Create a World” wound to a conclusion when Sung entered covered in orange fabric – part “Lamentation,” part Loie Fuller – to thrash and throw the silk in great arcs as the curtain fell.
Gallim has been around since 2007. “To Create a World” carries forward some of the traits of Miller’s earlier work and even some of the types – Reagan seemed like the dance descendant of Jonathan Windham, who stamped much of Miller’s earlier pieces.
Miller still has her sense of theater, but what was in short supply in “To Create a World” was her endearing sense of the absurd. If the piece was seamless, it also didn’t switch gears, and an hour of fluidity only made the piece seem long and flat. But “To Create a World” lived up to its name: the piece had the feel of an early, chaotic planet, where the laws of physics had not yet settled into order.
copyright © 2019 by Leigh Witchel
“To Create a World” – Gallim
The Joyce Theater, New York, NY
February 12, 2019
Cover: Allysen Hooks and Gary Reagan in “To Create a World.” Photo © Yi-Chun Wu.
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