Ballet Preljocaj’s dancers had just arrived in New York from France but their technical team’s visas had fallen through a black hole so Angelin Preljocaj’s Gravity was (literally) recast in a new light, thanks to an eleventh hour lighting scheme whipped up by the Joyce Theater’s nimble production team.
They could have hung a few Fresnels and mounted some sidelight booms and called it a day, for the durable Gravity would not have suffered. It’s a work of episodic beauty, spare and fanciful yet hardcharging and unsettling at times, costumed like a dream and danced with great mettle by a superb ensemble of twelve.
Franco-Albanian choreographer Preljocaj sculpted the piece from chunks of material manufactured without music. He would later tack on different pieces of music before settling on the final arrangement of industrial noise, sounds of birdsong, Ravel, Bach, Shostakovich, Daft Punk and Philip Glass. In a documentary on the making of Gravity, Preljocaj maintained that the final product bore the imprint of the old music that had been temporarily layered on the dance in the studio. It’s uncommon for music to be an after-thought in the process of creating dance but it’s an intriguing idea that the production is haunted by the ghosts of scores past.
He described the work as purely abstract – a departure from pieces that New Yorkers are most likely to have seen, including Spectral Evidence, inspired by the Salem witch trials, and La Stravaganza, a surreal colonial encounter, both created for New York City Ballet, his eco-warrior Swan Lake, and Le Parc, a time-traveling take on liaisons dangereuses. Gravity can be appreciated as a series of metaphors for what happens when masses collide. But it’s not hard to imagine a narrative arc starting with the origins of human life on earth to its destruction.
A circle of bodies at the start of the piece and another at the end billowed and shrank, galvanized by spiraling torsos, surging limbs, heads bowed and pressed into the next person’s back, elbows thrusting, circling, punctuating this mysterious ritual. Out of the circle, the unshakeable Clara Freschel emerged to perform a solo marked by fluid curves, high-tensile extensions into lingering balances and meditative promenades, and hands like snaking tendrils. She looked apprehensive yet curious, eager to explore her new surroundings. At the close of the piece, after each of her comrades was tenderly scooped up and lowered to the ground, she repeated the solo. This time her carriage was stern and stoic, as if she were contemplating her fate as the lone survivor of some terrible cataclysm.
Prior to their demise, in a series of disjointed episodes, the tribe gambolled in fetching outfits. The stunning costumes throughout, unmoored from time and place, were the designs of Igor Chapurin. Sheathed in black, they advanced on an unseen enemy, deploying a macho, calisthenic vocabulary in a mockery of militarism.
Bach sent everyone running on in gauzy silver skirts like fluffy cumulus clouds. Joyful stag leaps with torsos curled forward and air-chomping, turned-in, sideways scissor kicks nodded playfully to Paul Taylor.
Women roamed the stage as if on a quest, spinning their hands obsessively. They unfurled a leg into a high extension and rolled around on the floor, their hands still compulsively whipping around at speed. Barely audible was a recording of an oral account of the 1919 British scientific expedition to West Africa which documented a solar eclipse that would end up proving Einstein’s theory of gravity. In the context of a scientific mission, the women’s daffy gesticulations somehow took on a valiant quality.
Another odd but gripping scene involved the spectacle of men impelled to keep their head aligned with their partner’s right ankle. The women seemed unconcerned and went about their ballet-filled day while the men had to slither or crawl or pop up in the air whenever a leg was lifted, so as not to lose the cheekbone-ankle connection. This unusual partnering device required robust concentration and evoked an uncommon power dynamic in ballet dominated by the female.
Preljocaj’s work was complete long before the revelation that rocked the scientific world earlier this year: the cracking of the quantum code that allows gravity to be described in the same mathematical language as the quantum world of tiny particles. This paves the way toward understanding phenomena like black holes and what happened immediately after the Big Bang. And yet in the dream world that Preljocaj created back in 2018 is a vividly embodied premonition of this discovery – the convergence of the sleek curves of spacetime and the jagged spikes of quantum behavior.
The images displayed are not from this performance, due to technical issues.
