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IMPRESSIONS: SOULSKIN Dance Presents BEAUTY at Mark Morris Dance Center
By Hannah Lieberman
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Published on October 10, 2024
"BEAUTY." Photo by Claudio Rodriguez
Choreographer: Adrianna Thompson
Performers: Andrea Dusel-Foil, Alexandra FitzGibbon, Federico Garcia, Erika Hassan, Barbara Koch, Kennyth Montes De Oca, Leslie Plummer, Sophia Rumasuglia, Robert M. Valdez, Jr., Dianna Warren, Oren Yaari
Costume Designer: Cathay Cooper
Visual Artist: Iwalani Kaluhiokaklani
Composer: Roxy Roller
I’m always startled by the vastness and depth of the Duffy Performance Space at Mark Morris Dance Center. Before a performance begins, when the house lights are up, it resembles a dark abyss. I wonder who or what will take up that space.
Artistic Director Adrianna Thompson’s San Francisco-based SOULSKIN Dance marks its tenth season, and second in New York, with the evening-length work BEAUTY. The opening night audience was a slightly older, more millennial-heavy crowd than I’m used to; Bon Iver’s Skinny Love was on the pre-show playlist. The wide, black marley-floored stage was lit by a single, soft orange glow as people filtered in. I sensed that classic, palpable opening-night buzz.
BEAUTY unfolded as a total sensory experience with trippy projections, a diverse soundscape, and a contemporary ballet aesthetic. The overall tone was dramatic, yet some dancers exhibited a calm, collected energy which produced a striking dissonance. Ballet allusions stood out to me: a “dying swan” arabesque, heteronormative partnering, waltz steps, and stunning lines. Complicated, leggy shapes rapidly came together and fell apart. The dancers formed quartets and executed unison phrase work between more loosely structured, expressive sections. Often, they’d walk deliberately onstage and face the audience before beginning a phrase. There did not appear to be defined relationships between specific dancers; they existed as eleven distinct parts of a whole.
BEAUTY was almost sensorially overwhelming, but this did not detract from my experience of the dancing. It felt a bit like a nightclub, if you took a fraction of the dance floor and put it on a stage with bright light and open space that would make the laydancer uncomfortable. Techno music, sometimes with strings and fluctuating degrees of emotional charge, appeared to guide the abstract narrative, often initiating new ideas or sections. Digital projections, which were active for the entire work, toggled between artificial and natural imagery: blue-sanded deserts, daisies in a field, dark spiraling tunnels, and 2006-Macbook-screensaver-esque multicolored waves. Once the forty-five minute work began, it did not stop moving — at a speed so relentless it distorted my sense of time. Still not unlike a nightclub: all pulsing sounds, dreamy visuals, and bodies exiting and entering the space in a psychedelic blur.
“Ballet” is probably the correct word for this evening-length work, which was athletic, formal, and sometimes theatrical. Odd, quotidian gestures and sounds would infrequently interrupt long stretches of virtuosic choreography and melodic music. I wanted more of these; they anchored me amidst the swarming colors. Dancers covered each others’ mouths, faced the audience with elongated, silent screams, and held quivering hands close to their chests; a dial tone startlingly sliced the soundscape. I wondered about symbols when these gestures and sounds appeared, but they were too brief and sparse for me to meaningfully grapple with them.
Because of the speed and sensory density, it was difficult for me to grasp the movement vocabulary. There were active hands, expansive limbs that reached far from dancers’ centers, and a grounded, balletic confidence. Toward the end of the work, during an energetic unison section, it felt like the dancers were trying to prove something, or that they possessed higher knowledge about the world they’d created that the audience didn’t have the capacity to understand. When Thompson herself emerged in a blue dress for a short dance, it was a striking moment of clarity — I saw where the language of the work came from, on a body for whom it was utterly natural. Three dancers lifted and moved her through the space, but her interactions with them didn’t feel particularly charged. It felt like a moment of personal reflection, which departed from the work’s apparent insistence on a collective, unified experience.
The program describes BEAUTY as a “psychological ballet” that “illustrates how humanity needs to move past the forces at play in the world to restore their own divine power and the concept of true beauty.”
I wasn’t sure how these assertions of divine power and true beauty manifested in the work itself, but I did experience beautiful shapes, captivating colors, athletic bodies, and sounds that enveloped me — with brief flashes of the quotidian. In the world of BEAUTY, the divine lies not in the ordinary, perhaps suggesting that we’ve moved so far from it that it has become unrecognizable.
