Migration is among the most consequential of global forces. As a subject manifest in the movement of bodies, it seems especially suited for dance to address, and that is what “Frontera,” a work by the Canadian choreographer Dana Gingras, promises.
What “Frontera” — the title means border or frontier — delivers, however, is little more than a spectacular light show and an impressive display of stamina. It’s a disappointingly superficial and unimaginative take on a matter of great importance.
The work — which Gingras’s Montreal-based company, Animals of Distinction, gave its New York debut at the Brooklyn Academy of Music this weekend — begins with the overused practice of one dancer after another walking the perimeter of the stage. Gradually, their motion grows more athletic and helter-skelter as they run, jump, slide and roll. Bars of light fence them off from one another. Searchlights joust.
The slow build is supported by the Canadian rock band Fly Pan Am, whose four members are eventually revealed by a rising scrim to be playing live along the back wall. Theirs is a simple yet anthemic sound, insistently pounding toward a screaming intensity suitable for a mosh pit. While the dancers clump and thrash accordingly, the choreography is not without complexity or craft in its adding and shedding of bodies. The nearly ceaseless action and churning turnover create a perpetual-motion machine that’s a cardio workout for the cast. But a shortage of both modulation and motivation soon make this tedious for the audience.
The show, a long 70 minutes, has only one other mode: a thinly stretched sluggish tedium. The dancers lie on the floor as a laser light sweeps across their bodies, scanning them. They do some trapped-in-a-box mime, their limbs glowing as they pass through the plane of a laser. They huddle together, their humped collective form outlined brightly. And then they revert to the first mode.
This time is a little different. Walking the perimeter again, they discover some solidarity, picking up and passing one another’s bodies down the line. Once more confronted with the fence of light, they treat the bars a little more sensually, bathing in the beams, embracing them. But the intriguing ambiguity of this is crushed by the dull blatancy of an authoritarian voice that announces the building of a wall.
If “Frontera” is trying to demonstrate how migration patterns can seem senseless and political solutions crude, Gringas’s choreography mirrors its subject all too well. It lacks the articulation in similarly themed pieces by hip-hop companies or the honesty of the unrelenting physicality in, say, the work of Abby Zbikowski. Its repetitions seem less expressive of a cyclical vision than of a dearth of ideas.
Where “Frontera” does actually push into new frontiers is in its lighting, by the London-based collective United Visual Artists, which has an illusive physicality. The bars seem columnar; they shrink and stretch like vegetal growth in a time-lapse photo. When a laser beam splits and widens to form a triangle, the darkness on each side seems to part like curtains.
Near the start, a dancer walks across the stage with a beam pointed at his back that lengthens behind him as he travels. The effect is at once as if the light were pushing him and as if it were a strip he excretes, a line his motion brings into being. Now there’s a fresh visual metaphor for the creation of borders.
“Frontera” ends with a variation: two dancers, each trailing light or propelled by it, advancing from each side to center stage. There they meet, only to back away into the wings, dragged by tractor beams or covering their tracks. Just because we can’t see the dividing lines anymore, does that mean the lines are gone?
The post Review: A Superficial Take on Migration as Movement appeared first on New York Times.
