Larsen C is a giant ice shelf off the coast of Antarctica. A cold place and a dark one, at least in winter, it has been melting rapidly in recent years. “Larsen C,” a work by the Greek choreographer Christos Papadopoulos, is also grand, dark, continuously liquefying and inhumanly cold.
Making its United States debut at the splashy new Powerhouse: International arts festival in Brooklyn on Thursday, the hourlong “Larsen C” was the first work by Papadopoulos to drift over to these shores, and it arrived freighted with the raised expectations from having won the inaugural Sadler’s Wells Rose International Dance Prize earlier this year.
The performance begins in total darkness, out of which emerges what turns out to be the undulating form of a man’s back. In this first section, the lighting (by Eliza Alexandropoulou) keeps fading in and out, suggesting a place deep under the ice where the sun reaches only in unstable shafts, oblique and glacially cool.
The motion of the dancers, seven of whom eventually appear, amplifies this subaquatic effect. They glide across the floor with tiny swivels of heels and toes, like James Brown drained of all funk. Their torsos, rolling and circling, reminded me of the 1980s party dance called the Cabbage Patch. Sometimes, their arms arc in swimming strokes, and the fluidity and irregular speed of their trajectories all around the stage create a strong illusion of floating and drifting in currents.
Their satiny black costumes (by Angelos Mentis) mostly absorb the scarce light, but the exposed flesh of their arms glows. This allows for more illusions: one person’s limbs attached to another’s body or many limbs combined into octopus-like form.
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