When performance approaches real life, does that make it better or worse? In life, storytelling is messy, often confusing, filled with digressions and interruptions, with points over-elaborated or under-reported.
That’s something like the effect of “The Nexus Project With Ben and Michel,” a production of The Cambrians that grew out of a similar presentation in November 2013. Running through Feb. 1 at Dovetail Studios, this sort-of redo of a show—again different each night, now with 13 contributing choreographers—proved less cute, more cohesive. Or maybe the concept is growing on me.
The two dancers and their unaffected deep familiarity, often expressed in Moebius strips of aikido-like movement, hold the performance together. Benjamin Wardell and Michel Rodriguez Cintra are smart, charming, a little uncertain when speaking—and utterly assured when dancing. Rodriguez is literally light, fearless, hurling himself skyward or diving for the floor, always about to break into a grin. Wardell is more weighted, both psychically and physically, his powerful legs and flexible torso sculpting the space. Yet each can imitate the other.
At each performance, the dancers choose from a menu of possible “stories”; all five on Friday seemed new in some way or entirely new.
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One of those, a real delicacy, was the performance in full of Robyn Mineko Williams’ ingenious, precise but ebullient “Nexus Project” duet, bringing the dancers into indefinable connection—cupping each other’s ears, for instance, with a motion both intimate and distancing. Unlike most of the other sections, set to texts, it had a driving musical score.
Conversational sections separate the dancing ones. Wardell introduced Williams’ duet with an explanation of Gaga technique and brief audience-participation experiment. (Shy ones, don’t worry: Everyone closed their eyes.) The image used—picturing a little moon in each knuckle—apparently resurfaces in the closing duet, set to a voiceover reading of Jenny Hollowell’s short story “A History of Everything, Including You”: Rodriguez’s rotating hands suggest the orbits of planets.
In fact orbits and intersecting orbits seem to govern character and relationship here: Each dancer establishes his weight and gravity, and their individual orbits intersect in ever-new ways. Where most dance and theater pieces define character abstractly, here we’re shown the person, caught in the random, unmotivated, occasionally autobiographical web of movement and story.
That choice has a cost. It can produce uneven, inefficient results. Tellingly, my two favorites among the five sections were set to music, not words; essentially, I mourned the loss of these two magnificent, unique dancers in a more focused, admittedly more traditional choreographic context.
3 stars
When: 8 p.m. Friday-Saturday, 3 p.m. Sunday, through Feb. 1
Where: Dovetail Studios, 2853 W. Montrose
Running time: 70 minutes (varies each night)
Tickets: Pay-what-you-can at brownpapertickets.com/event/879622