KIMBERLY BARTOSIK/ daela
“The Materiality of Impermanence”
Dance Theater Workshop
Feb 3 – 6 at 7:30pm
In Kimberly Bartosik’s impressionistic and gorgeous-looking new work, “The Materiality of Impermanence,” she and Marc Mann explore a complex symbiosis influenced by the intangible characteristics of particular space. Bartosik’s dynamic movement aesthetic, smart text, and cogent choreographic structures, Glenn Rumsey’s soft and sparkly costumes, Luke Fasano’s atmospheric music, and Rick Murray’s electric architecture work together to produce spectacular territory for the exceptional performers to inhabit.
Sparse and meditative, the dance is marked by stretches of silence, repeated dressing and undressing, and charged action sequences that occur spontaneously in different rooms of the ephemeral house, and stop just as suddenly, reverting to a contemplative or halted state.
In the opening sequence, Mann walks onto stage and stands facing the back wall, dressed in black sneakers, pants, jacket, and hoodie. A microphone hangs from its cord above the front of the stage at head height. After a while, he walks briskly to the mic and thrusts it forward, signaling a black out with a popping burst of air that dissipates as the audio amplifier slows its pendulum swing.
“I wish I could write a song,” Bartosik’s voice over begins. “I have all the words.”
Mann repeats his movement phrase, speaking into the mic before he pushes it away—“It was in my mouth.” Bartosik’s text continues, being read live as she enters the space, walking backwards down the stairs on the right side of the house, microphone in hand.
“I have lines and lines, verses and verses,” she continues. “’Why don’t you have somebody else say them?’” she quotes someone as asking. “No,” she answers, and Mann once more propels the hanging microphone into motion.
Text about navigating through a house degenerates into word salad, as Mann flicks his joints, twisting and moving his feet in fast shifts that abandon balance. He and Bartosik walk towards each other, and when they meet, LED lights pop on, outlining a floor plan on the stage. “You are my power,” Mann says. “I need this power.” And the negotiations ensue, within and outside of the figurative house—in private and shared quarters, along corridors, and in doorways. Movement phrases alternate between duets of abrupt attacks with long-limbed and heavy-footed jumping—stamping the ground, slicing the air, pulling the body away from its facing direction—and solos of charged stillness, holding stylized poses in isolated spots on the stage. Work lights, cross-dissolves, blackouts, and other mesmerizing lighting effects reconfigure the space throughout the work, reversing interior and exterior, public and private perspectives, adding psychology to the drama.
Fasano’s localized looping musical score—a mélange of crunchy music box chimes with electronic moaning, Eno-esque ambient riffs, quiet alternative rock, and digitally distressed rhythmic refrains—emanates from CD players on stage that the performers turn on and off, and other portable sources the composer himself holds up to the microphone, and places on stage.
In one sexually charged and psychologically complex sequence, Bartosik approaches the hanging mic, says nothing, then kneels down and crumples a piece of paper loudly. In the house, the two tussle. She throws her falling weight into him, is caught hard under the arms and swung around, over and over. Then he places his hands on her waist and gently turns her around, and they stand facing each other. He reclines, regarding her with distance. She scoots into the slot between his legs, resting her elbow on his thigh, and removes the wrinkled paper from her pocket, rips off a piece, and feeds it to him. He chews and spits it out into the remaining paper.
Ultimately, the two exit the theater, hand in hand, up the stairs where Bartosik entered; but it’s not the end. There is an outcome, a consequence, or another memory, whose texture filters into the work like the dawn of a new day, or a fantastic dream of close encounters.
Joanna Kotze’s entrance is literally brilliant, descending through a portal of light that shines down the stairs on the opposite side. She mirrors Murray’s stunning lighting design in more ways than one, reflecting and mimicking the tones and textures in her black and silver jumper shorts and jet-black wig. Yet her movements–a stylized strut around the outer perimeter, long, leggy kicks and arabesques, and deep reaching lunges in relevé–generate a joie de vivre that is not evidenced in the duet. Is she the soul of a lost love, the light of a past life, the germination of a new idea, or the hope for a bright future? There is no definitive answer, but Bartosik and her extraordinary collaborators have crafted a compelling work, a captivating experience that is physically expressive, musically dreamy, and visually stunning, and from which many levels of meaning and feeling can be derived.
