The title of Miguel Gutierrez’s latest work, “Super Nothing,” reaches toward opposite ends of a spectrum, as if pulling itself apart: over-full and empty, momentous and insignificant. It evokes the contradictions of a life in dance — that medium which requires so much effort for so little material reward — and of being alive in general. In a recent conversation with Bill T. Jones, the artistic director of New York Live Arts, where “Super Nothing” opened on Sunday, Gutierrez noted that a dance or a life, in the grand scheme of things, “is a little blip.”
Which doesn’t detract from what a dance can do, or why it might be needed. In “Super Nothing,” the potent culmination of a two-year Live Arts residency, Gutierrez, 54, asks how dance can confront life’s steady stream of grief. How can relationships, relying on one another, help us through?
The relationships here, rife with both tenderness and struggle, play out among a cast of four dancers — Jay Carlon, Justin Faircloth, Wendell Gray II and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez — who give themselves completely to the evening’s messy demands. At different times, they could be lovers, family, friends or strangers. While Gutierrez, whose work cuts across disciplines of writing, music and dance, often makes text-heavy pieces, “Super Nothing” communicates almost entirely through movement, driven by the thumping beats of Rosana Cabán’s immersive sound design. The exception is an introductory poem that urges us to surrender our attention, and asks: “What will happen? What will happen to us?”
From this precipice of a question, the dance begins. Faircloth and Gray are the first to appear, one’s chin perched on the other’s shoulder before they break off on separate paths, limbs flinging and slicing with a restlessness that will intensify over the next hour. Gutierrez developed this work in part through revisiting old footage of his rehearsals. That process of sifting through the archive might contribute to the overall sense of fragments stitched together, sometimes with a smooth inevitability, sometimes with a jagged unpredictability.
