A few years ago, when the choreographer and writer Abigail Levine gave birth to a daughter, she worried about how her child’s sensory experience of the world might diminish as she acquired language. Levine gave herself the assignment to pay attention to sound.
It’s not surprising, then, that “Six Quiet Dogs,” the performance that grew from that assignment, is above all an aural experience. At Target Margin Theater in Brooklyn, where the vignette-structured work had its premiere on Thursday, plastic balls clink as they scatter, and ceramic cups scrape along cinder-block walls. Thin paper whispers as it’s torn.
The dominant sound, though, is that of words. Levine is an ingenious, imaginative and dryly witty writer, and the show’s texts are worthy of being collected. Many of them, in fact, are gathered in a chapbook called “Words Begin as Sound.” Each audience member gets a copy.
Levine has the ear to make a poem from a list of found phrases: “woke billionaires,” “Midwestern dad vibes,” “geriatric millennials.” Her play with prefixes reminded me of similar poetical parsing by the great May Swenson.
With the composer Paula Matthusen and the performer Kristopher K.Q. Pourzal, Levine heightens her rhyming quatrains into spare song. An allusion to the avant-garde Theater of Eternal Music led by La Monte Young (“It takes time for people to hear it”) signals the lineage of their approach. A lullaby about Andy Warhol’s helium-filled silver pillows is particularly lovely.
Within these texts, Levine carries on a stimulating meditation on the subject of her assignment. She shares a parable of a man who retreats to a room that lets in no sound, hoping to experience silence: “When you take away the world, it turns out, you hear yourself.”
As an enhanced poetry reading, “Six Quiet Dogs” is terrific. As choreography, it doesn’t quite rise to the same level. There are some wonderful moments, as when four dancers who join Levine set out tiny plastic cups, the kind used for medicine or shots of liquor, then suddenly start tossing them into the air. The resulting sound is like popcorn, pingpong, pachinko.
The strongest choreographic idea involves clusters of pencils. Levine and the two other women (Anna Azrieli and Martita Abril) sit on the floor and move the pencils with a swishing of legs. Then they spread their legs wide and gather the pointy objects by closing their thighs. The image is at once funny, fascinating and disturbing.
By comparison, most of the rest of the choreography is serviceable. And the first few sections of the work are diminished by a jokey, ingratiating tone. The dancer Julian Barnett reads from Sandra Boynton’s children’s book “Doggies,” accompanied by recordings of people imitating dogs poorly. The idea fits in, and the pleasure afforded by the six quiet dogs — by the moment of silence — is amusing, but it’s nevertheless an off-putting start to a work that turns out to be much more sophisticated.
The ending shows more confidence. The performers lovingly put their ears next to electric coffee grinders, and use that noise to find pitches for their own ecstatic vocalizations — treating the devices, understandably, like singing bowls for meditation. In the words of one of Levine’s self-describing texts:
Maybe this all means something
Maybe it’s just abstract
Maybe it’s a love song
Six Quiet Dogs
Through Sunday at Target Margin Theater, Brooklyn; targetmargin.org.
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