In 2009, when Andrea Miller created BLUSH for her company, GALLIM, 9-11 was in the rear-view mirror, but the fear it sparked lingered. The bodies of dancers slathered in white paint may have recalled the grim sight of survivors fleeing the collapsing World Trade Center towers, caked in ash. The ironic title refers to the flushing of the skin that emerges as the paint erodes during the dancers’ herculean exertions – dragging themselves along the ground, hurtling into each other, grappling in achingly slow duets, racing around an ‘arena’ marked by phosphorescent gaffer tape.
Today, the performance must hit differently than it did then. New to the piece, I can't say how the white body paint registered previously. Today, at the 92nd Street Y, with dancers barely six feet from the front row, their painted skin appeared more jaundiced than pale. Red-rimmed eyes, periodic convulsions and heavy, twisted footfalls evoked some calamitous illness or injury.
As the dancers inched along the ground scrunched up on their sides, or scrabbled on the ground with their hands, the connection to present-day war zones felt inevitable – where survivors of aerial bombardment face slow, systematic extinction as entire communities are razed, leaching toxins into air and soil; where so-called ‘buffer zones’ function as killing fields, patrolled by drones equipped with ordnance and thermal sensors calibrated to register body heat. The dancers often wrenched their heads back in extreme backbends, swept their gaze across the sky as if scanning for aerial threats, and sprinted doggedly, desperately, as if they were being hunted.
Still, this is dance, not documentary, and BLUSH attempts, with mixed success, to wrest the sublime from the horrific.
Physical encounters often yielded moments of extraordinary beauty: both oddly tender gestures and athletic entanglements – as when one dancer dove headfirst and slammed upside down into another, who caught them around the waist. Run-jump-catch became a frequent mesmerizing rhythm, driven by an urgent need to connect.
An urgent need to disconnect emerged when two dancers gripped a third by the ankles and a shoulder, repeatedly swinging her at the audience – as if trying to breach a fortress wall with a human battering ram.
In a shattering duet, Jamaal Bowman and Donterreo Culp swerved in and out of cones of light that evoked searchlights. One would wrap an arm around the other protectively, at times shielding the other’s eyes. They wrestled – almost playfully, sometimes desperately, or with a hint of sexual intimacy. One carried the other in a Pietà-like hold, covering ground in a big swirling lift, as if searching for aid for a wounded comrade-in-arms.
Set to Arvo Pärt’s Fratres in an eerie, near-mystical arrangement for cello and piano, the duet probes what it means to bear responsibility for one another.
Although the recording is piped through at an intolerable, distorting volume, it’s the only passage in which music and choreography take flight together. Elsewhere, the score – a stylistic mood-board spanning electropunk, ambient, Chopin, and Wolf Parade’s raucous I’ll Believe in Anything, that has suddenly reascended the charts thanks to a new, steamy, gay, Canadian hockey sitcom – felt curated more than cohesive.
Abruptly spirited from a war zone to a rave, the dancers turned giddy, bopping through a puzzling ending to this episodically haunting work. Fleeting smiles surfaced, but fear and anxiety still radiated. The absence of motivation for the sudden pivot from violence to a hedonistic revel, suggested that the physical expression of joy is as easy to ‘put on’ as physical expressions of pain and terror.
This performative ease recalls Miller’s SAMA, seen at the 2024 Fall for Dance festival at New York City Center, where it was paired with the National Ballet of Ukraine in Alexei Ratmansky’s Wartime Elegy, a lament for lives lost in the Russian invasion – among them, dancers from the company. In interviews, the Ukrainians spoke of ongoing trauma and of New York as a brief respite from the bombardment in Kyiv. Whoever devised that program, and subjected the Ukrainians to the sonic explosions and staged violence of SAMA, seemed not to have picked up a newspaper in two years.
That misjudgment lingers in the revival of BLUSH: its reenactment of violence and a turn to dance-floor release may have read as catharsis in 2009 but land differently now. Much of the work still resonates – but in a present reshaped by proliferating wars and overt cruelty, the pivot to revelry no longer persuades; it registers instead as a failure of imagination.
It was bracing, then, at the end, to see a dancer yank the gaffer tape from the floor – as if ripping up borders once quietly negotiated by politicians and titans of industry. That’s a constituency that ought to see BLUSH – though they would be unnerved by the suggestion that ordinary people could tear those borders down.
