Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón’s ‘[ ]’ Review: A Promising Idea

To title a dance work with an empty space between brackets is to leave a lot open. Almost anything might fill in the blank.

At Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Brooklyn, where Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón’s “[ ]” had its premiere this weekend, the space is initially filled by a striking set piece. It’s a pendant sculpture, like a mobile, and dangling from its suspended rods are metallic ornaments in homey cutout shapes: a tree, a house, a sailboat, a teapot, a crescent moon. It could hang over the crib of a giant.

As soon as the work’s dancers amble beneath the sculpture, they reveal a surprise. Whenever someone reaches up and touches an ornament, that touch triggers a sound. Different ornament, different sound. The sculpture is, in this way, a musical instrument large enough to be played by multiple moving bodies.

This allows for a collaboration between Westwood, a choreographer, and Negrón, a composer. The act of touching the ornaments is the main thread of the dance. The work’s choreography and its musical score are intertwined.

It isn’t long, though, before this promising idea begins to shrink in practice. As often happens in projects of this sort, some of the limitations seem to be technological. As an instrument, the mobile is a basic sample machine: one play per touch, no sustain, no expressive control. The samples change from section to section, but the sounds (buzzes, whistles, bells, drum hits) are rudimentary enough to be the aural choices for computer error messages or the noises in a child’s toy from which exasperated parents remove batteries.

Negrón and Westwood are both accomplished artists in their respective fields, but this collaboration seems to hem them both in. The choreography, created with eight dancers (one of them out because of an injury), is rooted in release technique, or simplified Trisha Brown: patterns of walking and pivoting in which arms are allowed to swing loosely, motion that might gust into twirls. This gently tidal activity is largely stuck under the sculpture, the dancers swinging from ornament to ornament as in some folk dance that mimes picking fruit.

Sometimes the action focuses on a solo or duet without changing much. Sometimes a dancer wields a video camera, capturing close-ups projected on the walls to no particular purpose. In one segment, the dancers roll on the floor, stretching in what looks like a desultory version of core strengthening exercises. The organic flow is hampered by the square rhythm of the noise triggering. The dance accelerates and slows but never really goes anywhere.

That’s probably by design. What I see as not enough is probably meant as a space devoted to what the program note calls “contemplative meditation.” Maybe the “Goodnight Moon” objects, toy sounds and tranquil motion are meant to evoke bedtime. Each repetition lulls us closer to “[ ].”

Adrienne Westwood and Angélica Negrón

Through Sunday at Target Margin Theater in Sunset Park, Brooklyn; targetmargin.org.

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