I saw Beyoncé dance at New York Live Arts on Thursday,
Not that Beyoncé, but a young performer from the Ivory Coast with the same mononym. And this Beyoncé was essentially a backup dancer for another mighty diva, the Ivorian choreographer Nadia Beugré.
Beugré commands attention: strutting like Tina Turner, charming with her gap-tooth smile, suggesting a little danger as she gets in the face of her audience. She has a gift for striking theatrical images that stick in the mind.
She was returning to New York Live Arts, as part of L’Alliance New York’s Crossing the Line Festival, with “Quartiers Libres,” the same work she performed there in 2012. Or rather with “Quartiers Libres Revisited,” that work with the addition of Beyoncé and Kevin Sery, another Ivorian dancer. The revisiting wasn’t a major revision, and it might have been preferable to see one of the many pieces Beugré has made since, but the hourlong work retains its power.
The new recruits got the party started, ambushing the audience in the theater’s lobby. Working very hard to work the crowd, they threw down their best moves — freestyling, twerking, flipping — and dragged a few willing spectators onto the concrete dance floor. Then they beckoned us into the theater.
Half the seating was roped off, and audience members were encouraged to sit on one of the platforms onstage. Beugré likes her audience close. She entered like a confident woman wandering into a club, sporting a golden minidress and high heels. Around her neck she wore the coiled cords of a microphone hooked up to nothing. It was this merely symbolic device that she thrust at the mouths of one cowed audience member after another, encouraging them to sing with her in French.
This aspect of the performance felt the least fresh, part of a thin and meandering beginning in which Beugré struck poses, dropped a chair and made sounds somewhere between pleasure and the pain of childbirth. Her theatrical imagination found more purchase as she stripped down to her underwear, and in uncoiling the cord became more entangled in it — hobbled, hogtied, the cord in her mouth like a bit.
This is where the audience participation became more interesting, since Beugré asked or coerced spectators into doing the detangling. It was touching to watch the care with which a few young women, who hadn’t signed up for the task, tended to Beugré and with difficulty freed her.
By this point, Beyoncé and Sery had joined in, running around frantically to the sound of alarms. For this revision, Beugré gave Sery the role of crashing into a giant curtain of water bottles. The self-slapping solo that followed was impressive and amusing, but for the remainder of the work, he and Beyoncé weren’t much more than refractions of the choreographer, mirroring her on platforms around the space.
The ending was nevertheless climactic. The three performers brandished garbage bags, and there was something both familiar and disturbing about the sound and action of their snapping them open. Then they slowly fed the bags into their mouths. So stuffed, they each crawled into a suit festooned with water bottles. It looked as if they were being swallowed by anemones.
These costumes, reminiscent of the artist Nick Cave’s sound suits, resonated in many ways. The dancers became porcupines of plastic, hedgehogs of garbage who squeaked and popped. After Sery and Beyoncé fell on their backs with an alarming crash, they all yanked out some of their bottle-quills like so many embedded arrows.
But the trash bags were still in their mouths. When they finally removed them, it was like a grotesque magic trick, with more and more of the toxic stuff gradually emerging. Two extra mouths didn’t triple the moment’s horror and awful beauty, but they didn’t diffuse it either. The fade-out is still a stunner.
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