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.
In their opening duet, Faircloth and Gray seem coolly detached from each other. But after Carlon and Narvaez join them, the interactions that unfold a become more entangled, suffused with desire or desperation or gentler expressions of care. These entanglements can be literal — four bodies entwined in a slow-moving heap — or more like a ripple effect, as when Faircloth, in a startling, stumbling solo, trembles in a way that seems to cause the others to tremble too.
Gutierrez injects some humor into these encounters, resisting preciousness. In a section suggestive of wild nights out, under the pink and purple hues of Carolina Ortiz’s lighting, three dancers lock into an erotic tableau, as the fourth (Gray) mimes taking a phone call.
But the presiding mood is more melancholic, and some moments land with sudden, aching force. One recurring image calls to mind the losses of the AIDS epidemic and the lineage of queer artists to which Gutierrez belongs. Surrounded by his companions, Gray lies on his back on the floor; Carlon holds his hand, Narvaez caresses his chest. Even after they move on to the next thing, the image lingers.
Some aspects of “Super Nothing” feel more repetitive than revelatory, like the ever-present motif of wavering, shuddering bodies. But the cumulative effect, especially as a more structured ending emerges, is of these four people, this small collective, poignantly persisting together.
Occasionally, Gutierrez reminds us that we, the viewers, are also part of this persistence. In an interlude that allows for a wardrobe change (from black-and-white to neon-green-accented costumes, designed by Jeremy Wood) spotlights scan the theater walls and land on the audience. It’s a moment of feeling implicated, exposed, in which to briefly wonder at our roles here.
A similar sensation settles in at the end as the dancers come to face us, furiously slashing and stirring the space around them. They retreat toward the back wall, eventually easing into a simple, vulnerable pose with outstretched arms. When they exit one by one, the lights don’t fade; they come up on us. We’re right where we began, and yet so much has happened. What next?
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