Alone With the Stars

Humans have often looked to the stars to understand the universe and our place in it, decoding their destiny as an explorer would chart his course to the land of spices. In the night sky, our constellations are ablaze with myths of angry gods and dead emperors, and immortal tales of vanity and jealousy. In Bebe Miller’s enchanting new work, “Landing/Place,” which premiered at Dance Theater Workshop on Wednesday, images of her dancers wheel across the backdrop like a zodiac across the heavens.The novel effect is the result of experiments with a new motion-capture technology that digitally records movement in pinpricks of light. In “Landing/Place,” Ms. Miller uses this technology and an impressive array of other media to explore our idea of home and, by analogy, our sense of purpose.Ms. Miller is particularly interested in the problem of our irreconcilable uniqueness. The dancers are a motley crew to be sure, each wearing clashing (and gender-bending) outfits of vintage clothing. Although they move together as an urban tribe, they exhibit strong personalities. They gossip, flirt, and cheer in exaggerated behavior, confronting social taboos and private hang-ups.Uniting them is the physicality of their bodies. They melt into one another and then change their minds, whirling off in a different direction. Throughout the encounters, Ms. Miller seems to draw a parallel between the way we express ourselves with our bodies and the larger decisions we make. In a memorable image, dancers take turns balancing upside-down; for once, they are rooted in the ground, their legs sprouting upwards.At the center of the stage rests a miniature house the size of a bird feeder. In a series of wide-ranging vignettes, five dancers overwhelm the small house, stomping and cavorting around it. When Angie Hauser leans over it to peek through the open door, she exudes a strong sense of confronting the past and her own memories. In another section, David Thomson’s emphatic strides instruct a row of dancers standing at attention about what life must be like inside.The Bebe Miller Company, celebrating its 20th anniversary this year, is a fiercely innovative troupe that includes, in addition to the dancers, a composer, a video artist, an animation artist, and a dramaturge. Video footage and animation are projected onto the screens in “Landing/Place,” depicting domestic spaces (a curtain breasting in an open window, the interior of a closet) along with images of destruction and natural disaster (severe flooding, road slides). A utopian community of identical box houses is rearranged endlessly in one animated sequence, only to be replaced by an urban cityscape in which the exposure has blackened out the windows.Albert Mathias’s sound design, performed live on Wednesday, uses a slide guitar twang with rhythmic distortions to create an aural landscape heard from a moving train. Vocal samples give the impression of travel into unknown territories: We hear a talkative woman trying to puzzle aloud the Italian from the opening canto of Dante’s “Inferno” (“Midway upon the journey of our life / I found myself within a dark forest”). She intersperses her translation with commentary of her own (“They don’t know where they are going! They can’t see in front of them!)For the last five years, the members of Ms. Miller’s company have lived in different parts of the country, meeting throughout the year in various residencies. Ms. Miller has called her team of collaborators a “virtual company” for their distance apart. But the distance could not be more appropriate for a choreographer who has built her career on our essential aloneness, the necessity and impossibility to communicate.In the closing scene, we see a projection of the home again, but it looks sinister, as if battered by a black wind in the overexposure. The camera flies over it with a flock of birds. Onstage the dancers roll on the ground as if they are lying awake at night, desperately tossing over their plans, thinking about what they are doing in life, and not quite certain whether they are awake or dreaming. New York City is full of these people, and, as Ms. Miller’s new work reminds us, so is the rest of the world.October 14 & 15 at 7:30 p.m. and October 14 at 10 p.m. (219 W. 19th Street, between Seventh and Eighth Avenues, 212-924-0077).

Alone With the Stars

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