Obsession Made Compulsively Watchable

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The New York Sun

Falling into Sarah Michelson’s intelligent, transfixing new piece “DOGS” is a little like going on a drunken bender and then waking up, a bit groggy, in a Soho design store. The work is a profoundly discombobulating trip inside Ms. Michelson’s mind — from the painful farewell-to-youth epilogue to the careful stenciling on every floor tile, “DOGS” seems to be Ms. Michelson’s detail-obsessed, peripatetic brain turned inside out.

Certainly her face, or rather, the bright pink outline of her face, occasionally appears on the stage-curtain like a neon signature. The tatty grandeur of BAM’s Harvey Theater usually manages to put its stamp on the work that happens there, but, this time, Ms. Michelson beats it to the punch. Muffling its warm red brick in long grey curtains, and filling the audience’s space with tree gobos (cut-out projection patterns) and lighting instruments, she manages to remake almost every surface the audience sees or encounters. The line-drawing of her head just formalizes the relationship — we are in her headspace, for good or ill.

And it is overwhelmingly good. When the curtains first part, we see a black-and-white space, the floor covered in overlapping circles as closely and dizzyingly patterned as a Moorish palace. Huge constructions made out of heavy, black theater lights sprout from the ground like 14-foot high seaweed fronds. Above, flat platters of those same lights hang like metal clouds or the heads of giant, light-shedding flowers. And, tiny among them, dances Parker Lutz doing a repetitive series of soutenus and développés, a blank-faced Titania lost in meditation.

Center stage — decorated with the same overlapping circles — a long white table holds some tempting looking golden-brown capons. (Not to worry, the audience gets to eat chicken at intermission, ostensibly so that we can share as many of the performer’s sensations as possible.) A curtain rings up and down like an eyelid: at first, it simply reveals Ms. Lutz, revolving in a slightly different location on stage. But then it blinks open to show Ms. Michelson and Jennifer Howard, dressed in black Martha Graham caftans, also high on relevé, having strange, precise conversations with their feet. (Both Ms. Howard and Ms. Michelson have announced that this piece is a swan’s song — Ms. Michelson’s injured hip may not have been evident onstage, but offstage she needs a cane.)

The pointillist first act, with its hundreds of light cues by Davison Scandrett and Ms. Michelson, gives way to a second act of lush Romantic strokes. In fact, the work that follows intermission, in which dancers seem to trade bodies, so completely refigures the earlier aesthetic that it would be churlish to spoil the surprise.

I can say that it relies rather heavily on a stage precipitation — where there was a smattering of snow in the first act, the fog has rolled in by the second. Ms. Michelson, who has devoted an entire row of seats to lights pointing directly upward, seems to create phantom audience members, tall columns of haze that sit in front of their human counterparts. Sure, every choreographer probably dreams of building her own spectators, but even these swirling, phantom watchers couldn’t have enjoyed “DOGS” any more than I.

Until October 21 (30 Lafayette Ave., between Ashland Place and Felix Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4100).


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