Audience Reviews

AUDIENCE REVIEW: CUNY DANCE INITIATIVE- Tabula Rasa Dance Theater: 2024-25 Resident Artist

Company:
TABULA RASA DANCE THEATER

Performance Date:
September 20-21 2024

Freeform Review:

Concert Pianist:  John Gavalchin 

Sound Design:  Deco Delorean

Lighting and Scenic Design:  Christopher Annas-Lee

Choreography:  Felipe Escalante

Costumes: Lauren Starobin

Music 

• Vers la flamme, Op. 72                                       Alexander Scriabin
• Réminiscences de Norma, Op. 20               Franz Liszt After V. Bellini
• Sonata in F minor, K.466                                   Domenico Scarlatti 
•  

Tabula Rasa Dance Theater’s Animus Necandi, premiered first in a workshop at City Center studios and then onstage at the Gerald Lynch Theater, is a visceral dance piece that delves into the violence and the darkness in our human psyches. Through raw, angular movements the company’s performers suggest the horrific methods by which humans kill their own kind. Some gestures evoke aggression, others entrapment and vulnerability. 

We see, for example, one woman’s full range of anguished gestures, suggesting her passage through every stage of grief.  We also see a frieze of dancers, walking solemnly, feet flexed,  and holding onto one another’s hands like a chain of paper dolls, in a  trance-like state of collective sorrow. John Gavalchin’s virtuoso rendition of Liszt becomes a sonic shroud, enveloping dancers, both moving and still.

Evoking the pain of families who have lost loved ones condemned to the death penalty, Animus Necandi explores why we find it difficult to talk about grief and death. It also examines the complex moral issue of capital punishment, which continues as a legally sanctioned practice in more than 55 countries, 27 of the United States, and  here on a Federal level. 

If life is our most precious gift, Animus Necandi seems to be asking, is it ever permissible to extinguish it ? 

Author:
Sylvia Susskind

Website:
www.tabularasadancetheater.com

Photo Credit:
Steven Pisano