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IMPRESSIONS: Sally Silvers and Dancers in “You Better” at Roulette
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on April 10, 2025
Sally Silvers and dancers. Photo: Julie Lemberger
Choreography & Direction: Sally Silvers
Collaborating Dancers: Bria Bacon, Dominica Greene, Takemi Kitamura, Eva Rodríguez Langevin, Molly Lieber, Benedict Nguyen, S.C. Lucier (on skates)
Sound Design & Live Music: Bruce Andrews & Michael Schumacher
Additional Music Composition: Douglas Knehans (excerpts from “To the Stars” based on Enheduanna’s writings) // Set Design: Tamar Ettun (curated by Roxana Fabius)
Lighting Design: Kathy Kaufmann // Costume Design: Elizabeth Hope Clancy //Associate Costume Design: Alexis Hoffman
March 22, 2025
Veteran New York dancemaker Sally Silvers admits to a “girl crush” — a long-standing and ever-evolving love for the many dimensions of the feminine spirit. Her latest creation, You Better, uses poetic structures of sound and movement to direct a cast of seven (plus a brief cameo by Silvers herself) through dreams of pasts and futures. She draws from the poetic writings and sacred hymns of Enheduanna, a Sumerian high priestess recognized as the earliest known named author, circa 2300 BCE.
Silvers inverts the theatrical space of Roulette Intermedium: its raised stage becomes seating risers, a perch from which we become witness to an enigmatic ritual in the open arena below. Tamar Ettun’s large, kite-like figures hang from above, evoking totemic, wide-eyed birds and sacred symbols in graphic blocks and slashes of red, white, and black. The ancient rubs up against the modern and the everyday in Bruce Andrews and Michael Schumacher’s patchwork soundscape that lingers and shifts unpredictably throughout.
The performers span a variety of origins, generations, and styles that lend texture to their unisons and authenticity to their solos and pairings. Six dancers form a clan that enacts gestures of mutual support and collaboration with S.C. Lucier as their enigmatic, feathered grrrl-punk goddess on roller skates. Roulette’s smooth, varnished wood floor makes for ideal gliding, and Lucier navigates tight spaces and curves, intricate footwork, and hieroglyphic passes with a weighted presence and undercurrent of mysticism. The dancers’ ritualized gestural language structure motifs of rhythm, form, and posture; their eyes bore directly into us, faces contorting through exaggerated deadpan grins and fleeting smirks. They fold their hands and shuffle through snaking patterns and ordered lines, forming kaleidoscopic machines and coalescing into expressive tableaus. A long, twisting loop of ribbon becomes a cat’s cradle for the group to weave deft geometries that dissolve with a single pull.
Though they often act as a unit, their individualism shines through. Each time their cat’s cradle magically unfurls, a different dancer occupies the center of the ribbon’s circle for a short solo to feature their personal qualities and embodied idiosyncrasies. Silvers returns continually to this juxtaposition of individual and group, including in her own appearance on the fringes of an angelic movement chorus. The result is a collection of sketched portraits fleshed out through shape and sensation, arrayed together in a landscape of tenuous order. The dancers grasp and devour the space around them as much as they fold into the space within themselves, relishing each movement with an air of genuine discovery.
In every aspect, Silvers demonstrates a facility for working within spaces of contrast and contradiction: she resists the imperative to order and define individuals or their parameters, instead letting difference be fully expressive of its universalizing potential. Across gulfs of time, space, and subjectivity, Silvers and her tribe find grounding in their divine feminines to echo through a world of their own making. If the pieces of You Better don’t immediately cohere, a logic emerges in the aftermath of its cacophonies. Its harmonies and dissonances, its frictions and lustrous confluences — this is the stuff life is made of.
