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IMPRESSIONS: Netta Yerushalmy MOVEMENT at NYU Skirball
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on November 13, 2024
Marina Levitskaya
A work by Netta Yerushalmy
Created with and performed by: Joyce Edwards, Burr Johnson, Catie Leasca, Christopher Ralph, Caitlin Scranton, Jin Ju Song-Begin, Hsiao-Jou Tang
Original Music: Paula Matthusen
Dramaturgy: Katherine Profeta
Lighting Design: Tuçe Yasak
Costumes: Magdalena Jarkowiec
Stage Management: Tricia Toliver
Developed with Los Angeles Performance Practice
Produced by: The Blanket
Is there anything new in dance? Can a dancemaker truly create something new?
Dance is certainly not new: expressive physical communication is primordial, instinctual, and universal. Even formalized dance originates from many-branching global lineages passed through generations of embodied practice, not to mention the social vernaculars and cultural codes that compose our dances of the everyday. Our bodies are by their very nature expressive physical interfaces, constantly in communication with other bodies and the world around us: asserting selfhood, seeking understanding, and constructing sensory bridges to the not-yet-known. Expressive movement shapes our minds and bodies, coding reflexes and responsive patterns deep into our cells and synapses. These movements live inside us, they become us, each one of us newly composed and continually recomposed of ancient ingredients.
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So no, it seems there is nothing new in dance, yet our natures create the conditions for infinite possibilities of renewal within an ever-expanding human archive of movement.
Dancemaker Netta Yerushalmy approaches the question of newness in dance through a voracious engagement with the archive. Her 2018 PARAMODERNITIES lecture-performance series spanned six brilliantly deconstructed responses to canonical pillars of 20th century dance: Ailey, Balanchine, Cunningham, Fosse, Graham, and Nijinsky. The project’s deeply collaborative scholarly-embodied-historical research crafted dialogue across space and time, simultaneously teaching, learning, interrogating, and resisting the material of the dance canon. With MOVEMENT—premiered in 2022 and restaged this fall at NYU Skirball—Yerushalmy sets out with the same ravenous curiosity and collective ethos to stitch “a radical quilt of borrowed material” from her and her collaborators’ embodied heritages. Where PARAMODERNITIES takes its subjects one by one, MOVEMENT jumbles them all together into an ecstatic salad of formal performance that pulses and radiates from the proscenium. Yet the work is far from derivative, and by no means an abstraction; it is an egalitarian collage of physical vernacular, a Babelian celebration of multilingual simultaneity, an inexhaustible cascade of invention driven by engines of embodied knowledge and instinct.
MOVEMENT’s body-boggling vault of over 100 citations and credits channels worlds of references through the bodies of its seven heroic performers, each of whom lends pieces of themselves to the archive. For the viewer, the mosaic of references creates conduits for moments of recognition and physical empathy—the dancer Lindsey Jones called it “a game of I Spy for dancers”—within a sensory landscape of ever-shifting, never-contrived pathos, meditation, and joy. While cheekily specific dance quotations abound, MOVEMENT shatters the confines of a “dancer’s dance” as Yerushalmy weaves social gestures and pop culture references into the fabric of the work. Classical and modern dance traditions from Africa, Asia, Europe, and the Americas rub shoulders with snippets from global folk dance, social dance, behavioral codes, childhood memories, music videos, TikTok challenges, opera, fashion, art, theatre, film, TV, sports, and phrases from the work of Yerushalmy’s contemporaries, as learned and absorbed by the choreographer and her collaborators. Amid this wealth, each one of us enjoys an entirely unique experience reflective of our own embodied archive; the dance is a mirror for us to see and feel ourselves dancing.
Yerushalmy averts movement overload by grounding and guiding sensory perception through a concomitant journey of sound and light. Composer Paula Matthusen’s electronic score opens with pings that bounce directionally from the auditorium’s many speakers, collecting and building to unfold through abrupt shifts and imperceptible morphings of mood, mode, and instrumentation. These changing environments draw attention to how we read movement through sound, as well as color and light: ominous darkness, bright joy, vivid dreams, equanimous calm, disorienting exposure. Lighting design by Tuçe Yasak supports and surprises, astonishing the eye equally with saturated floods of lime and magenta and hazy tinges of blue-gray and dusty lavender, sculpting space with subtle blocks and rippling waves of light and shadow. Multimedia artist Magdalena Jarkowiec’s casually architectural costumes, constructed and textured uniquely for each dancer in a uniform neon green, evoke the work’s qualities of unity and diversity, their definitive color destabilized by light reflected and absorbed.
MOVEMENT’s tonal harmonies of design keep the work from becoming a run-on sentence, as does Yerushalmy’s virtuosic deployment of stillness. While garrulous movement spills and bubbles from the performers’ bodies, it is the uncanny fullness of their perfect stillness that truly brings the work to life. Arrayed in painterly tableaus, scattered like a sculpture garden, curled into tiny eggs, or stacked like pancakes, the sudden clarity of stillness illuminates the cascading dynamism of movement. And oh, what movement: Yerushalmy activates the entire stage space with compositional fluency as the performers tag team through overlapping solos, duets, and group dances. Together they build an internal world and welcome us inside with open arms and sly winks, confident they’ll have something to seduce us into their vernacular intimacies. Each performer’s unique physicality, temperament, training, and life experience contributes to a constellation of ingrained and acquired material, which they transmit to one another and put on with the gracious authenticity of care. While the dance’s quotational structure urges them to radically shift between tones and textures second-by-second, they each have some opportunity to showcase the movement that lives in their body. The fluency of their range astonishes—“versatility” doesn’t begin to express its extent—yet they remain consummately themselves.
Out of orgiastic catharsis, visceral struggle, and slapstick contagion the performers forge relationships and build community. As the stage dims and credits roll above them, they join hands and tread softly around the space, weaving and looping, leading and following, transcending history through shared footfalls. Phrase by phrase, MOVEMENT redefines the meanings of “body language” and the potential for dance to craft empathy as a mode of understanding across illusory boundaries of culture, dialect, and form.
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