Joanna Kotze’s “this is the beginning, this is the end” starts in the middle of something. Dancers rush onstage and rearrange sections of metal fence around two musicians, who agitate the space with electronic ticking and processed screams. This new configuration has barely settled before the lights blink a reset and everything is rearranged. And then rearranged again.
The dance, through Saturday at New York Live Arts, where Kotze is this year’s resident commissioned artist, is seldom stagnant, though it does repeat. With the fences now framing the stage, Hsiao-Jou Tang stands in a rear corner like a gymnast about to begin a floor routine. Her solo is long and eccentric and soon ceases to be a solo. Kotze puts herself in the corner and begins the same routine, sharing space with Tang.
After a while, Lena Engelstein commences her own iteration, followed by Symara Sarai. Such canon repetition is a common choreographic device, but here it’s enlivened by some variation — a dancer might leave the stage and return later in the sequence — and by the music and Kathy Kaufmann’s lighting. Periodically, the sound squeezes off into silence for a bit, and then comes back in with a boom, a blackout and a flush of color, giving the dance a jump-start.
In the second half of this 55-minute work, the full cast of six dancers lines up to create something like a human paper shredder. A repeated sequence involves stepping forward with arms front, pivoting and then reversing the motion to the rear, over and over. But since each dancer starts in the opposite direction of his or her neighbors, the whole group seems to be advancing frantically in both directions at once. Instead of the opposing moves canceling each other out, this roiling mass drifts. When it runs into a boundary, it adapts, Blob-like, and persists in the same action along a different vector.
In preshow interviews, Kotze has spoken about history repeating itself and about the positive force of collective action versus the threat of conformity. Primed to look for political meaning, I experienced that shredder as a visceral evocation of what the past 10 years of American politics have felt like — the continual, disorientating whiplash combined with the sense of being helplessly adrift.
The work doesn’t have to be read that way. Kotze and her collaborating cast keep the political resonances mostly unfixed. The mass switches to new obsessive sequences. Individual dancers break off, spinning across the floor or scrambling up and down the raked audience seating. The group throws down the fences, pauses to look up at the sky. One by one, each dancer becomes still or nearly still, as if paralyzed.
As this happens, the musicians, Maralie Armstrong-Rial and Ryan Seaton, sing a phrase in harmony, adding a word with each repetition: “You,” “You can,” “You can let.” In the performance I saw, when they arrived at “You can let all these years go,” I felt relief, only to be caught up short when the phrase expanded to “You can let all these years go unanswered.”
Was that a siren voice of complacency, of capitulation, of quietism? Whether you find the dance depressing or hopeful probably depends on how you feel about the most recent turns in American politics. This is the end. This is the beginning.
Joanna Kotze
Through Nov. 14 at New York Live Arts; newyorklivearts.org
