The choreographer Lenio Kaklea, born and raised in Greece, has made her career in France. On Saturday she made her U.S. debut on the ball fields of Governors Island in New York Harbor. This was an apt port of entry, as the work she brought — and another she presented later in the week at New York Live Arts — focused on the boundaries between nature and culture. (Both works are part of L’Alliance’s Crossing the Line Festival.)
On Governors Island, audience members gathered on the grass for “Analphabetes,” uncertain where to look for the performance or how to distinguish the performers from passers-by. Then four figures appeared on a hill in the distance, wearing retro windbreakers, as still as the trees around them. Like branches in the wind, they began to stir. Their moves, taken at the pace of tai chi exercises, progressed from arboreal to avian, arched like wings.
Slowly, they came closer, stork walking, posing on the ground. They operated independently, so that when they finally snapped into unison, it had a startling force. Not as startling, though, as when the dancers came within inches of viewers and stared in their eyes, staying blank faced as they blew up cheeks and stuck out tongues. What had been far away and nearly imperceptible became uncomfortably close.
Then the performers retreated again, breaking into a witty trot. The gestures from the beginning returned, this time with the dancers backed by the skyline of Lower Manhattan as they receded, in a relay pattern, into the distance once more over another hill.
“Analphabetes” means “illiterates” in French, but also “those without an alphabet,” like literate speakers of Chinese. The dancers’ gestures — sometimes animal in shape and rhythm, like those in the nature studies of Merce Cunningham — retained the quality of human signs. The whole thoughtfully designed performance was reminiscent of the outdoor experiments of Twyla Tharp and Trisha Brown in the 1970s, skillfully and somewhat ingenuously crossing lines that had been crossed long ago.
At New York Live Arts, Kaklea performed “Agrimi” (“Fauve”), Greek and French for “wild beast.” Where on Governors Island she was joined by three New York dancers, here her two colleagues were longtime Greek friends. The three began with sexy-beast moves cribbed from music videos: pulsing their hips, slapping their own backsides, grabbing their crotches, shaking on all fours.
The work’s center section was a kind of postmodern folk dance: a rotating pattern of a few steps forward, a few steps back, which methodically accumulated some swing-your-partner complexity. Much of the interest derived from the odd number of dancers, which forced a continual circulation of pairings and push-pull relationships.
After a blackout and a voice-over recitation of an uncanny folk tale about the crossover between animals and humans, Kaklea reappeared naked from the waist down, while the other female dancer (Ioanna Paraskevopoulou) went topless. The performers hit punching bags, lighted so the swinging shadows loomed, and they played with a chain, that symbol of domestication. Finally, they took to the trees — climbing metal poles and switching among pole-dancer positions at the speed of sloths.
What was intriguing — and frustrating — about all this was the absence of wildness. Doing the music video moves, Kaklea resembled a bookish girl trying out for the high school hip-hop dance team. The whole performance was curiously lacking sexual tension or a sense of risk, even when the chains were looped around necks or when the male dancer (Georgios Kotsifakis) put his face between Kaklea’s unclothed thighs.
Kaklea borrowed the folk tale from the French anthropologist Charles Stépanoff, and her own choreographic perspective is anthropological, that of a participant observer. She is intelligently aware of the performance context — of watching and being watched — but the experience of the work is less of a performance than of a presentation of related ideas. The tensions she wants to embody — the blurring of lines between human and animal, between violence and affection — are so low in intensity as to be nearly theoretical.
Which makes her highly controlled work the kind that inspires cerebral admiration rather than wilder emotions. The errand into wilderness, the journey into the forest, stops at the edge of the notebook. Only at the end of “Fauve,” as I listened in the dark to the sound of a storm, could I feel the larger, ungovernable forces I had been missing and craving.
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