Traffic Here, There, Everywhere

Wally Cardona’s “Everywhere,”the final offering of the 2005 Next Wave Festival, began a week’s run Tuesday night at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Mr. Cardona designed not only the choreography for the five dancers but the stage setting as well. This makes sense, because the set partners actively with the dancers: “Everywhere” could be described as a narrative of how the setting engenders, animates, and interacts with the performers, as well as how it permutes through the course of the piece.As “Everywhere” begins, lights go up on a stage implanted with oblong black piers arrayed in serried ranks that suggest a graveyard.Mr. Cardona appears at the right toting an armful of more of the same piers across the stage before disappearing into the left wing. When he reappears empty-handed, he crosses the stage and returns with a new armload of piers.You are meant to presume that something is going on, that something is being built off stage – but you can’t see what it is.Not long into the piece, Mr. Cardona abandons these errands between stage wings and turns his attention instead to engineering the piers placed on stage. The standing piers undergo a veritable rise, decline, and fall as he now shifts some to the ground so that they form right angles with the standing ones. Later, Mr. Cardona then lays piers horizontally onto standing ones so that they form a dolmen shape, and arrays piers vertically on top of yet more piers.The role Mr. Cardona has assigned himself owes a manifest debt to Merce Cunningham’s trademark trope of bustling around doing something apparently purposeful, even urgent, but at the same time nonsensical, or rather not satisfying a goal-oriented expectation. Like Mr. Cunningham, Mr. Cardona will turn a corner pre-emptively, deflecting anticipation of destinations arrived at and tasks fulfilled.“Everywhere” defies the audience’s attempts to form mental patterns and extrapolate associations from what is performed on stage. Connections and continuities between actions are truncated, and fragmented information is withheld as often as it is supplied. Gestures that might suggest something specific are denatured, blurred, and blunted.At times throughout the piece, it seems as if each phrase, or even each step, is an attempt to nullify the meaning of the preceding one.In a sense, the stage setting of “Everywhere” acts as a traffic control director, sending the dancers in wending sorties around the piers, propelling them to make clipped feints backward and forward, running up and down pathways resembling bowling alley lanes.When one dancer collided with a pier and knocked it over, it wasn’t clear that this was deliberate, but it was certainly inevitable given the way the piers enclosed the dancers in tightly confining strips of space.Two women, Joanna Kotze and Kathryn Sanders, are a duo, swiveling on and off stage together, but they exist in a kind of impervious autonomy that characterizes the relations of many dancers in BAM’s Next Wave Festival; their movement neuroses border on disturbance, their arms are gnarled and spasmodic, and when they parody a mannequin’s glide, arms akimbo, they do so with a ferocious glare.Matthew Winheld joins the women in lunges, tilts, gyrations, and spastic arm movements. When Ms. Kotze places her outstretched leg on Mr.Winheld’s back, a male-female partnering theme emerges. Mr. Cardona, meanwhile, remains engaged in building a wall of piers across the stage, having become something of a lonely yeoman. But he too eventually begins a partnership, dancing with Ms. Sanders.The denouement of “Everywhere” is destruction. Three-quarters of the way through the piece, the live musicians of the Ethel string quartet leave their assigned perches in the theater’s stage boxes and are supplanted by an ambient soundtrack of chimes and carillon, composed by Phil Kline.A new dancer, Kana Kimura, appears and assumes a series of disembodied poses. The dancers join forces to level the set and smash the constructed configuration of piers.But there is apotheosis; Ms. Kotze and Mr. Winheld start laying piers on the ground as if to pave it with railroad ties, and then they start to build a staircase. Ms. Kotze stands at its head, and Mr. Winheld is behind her, seemingly ready to ascend cortege-style. This degree of unanimity, however, cannot endure. Instead, he sits down, turning away from her on this stairway to heaven (or to nowhere).Like the programs presented by Batsheva and Sasha Waltz earlier in the Next Wave Festival, “Everywhere” is 70 minutes long and performed without an intermission. Someone has figured out that this is the right length and format in which to engage an audience intellectually with deliberately obscure works, without trying the audience’s patience.Until December 17 at BAM’s Harvey Theater (651 Fulton Street, Brooklyn, 718-636-4181).

Traffic Here, There, Everywhere

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