Audiences have been headed down a rabbit hole to explore Andrea Miller’s WONDERLAND since it premiered in 2010. After tinkering and touring, her GALLIM dance company has now brought an expanded version to New York. Billed as “a playground of ironies” that “examines pack mentality,” the present hour-long incarnation is a series of nightmarish rituals, graced by fleeting moments of intense wonder. The lyrics to Joanna Newsom’s The Book of Right-On, which serves as soundtrack to one particularly bleak episode, sums up the experience: “I killed my dinner with karate/Kick 'em in the face, taste the body/Shallow work is the work that I do/Do you want to sit at my table?/My fighting fame is fabled/and fortune finds me fit and able.”
The indomitable dancers of GALLIM are in fighting shape for the punishing feats set for them by Miller: gymnastic contortions, ponderous balletics, leaps, spins and lifts that often come crashing to the floor. Androgynously clad in variations on a silvery bodysuit with stocking-like skullcaps through which protrude tufts of hair, their affect is occasionally creaturely, more often cartoon-like.
Solo turns belonging to shopworn characters identified in the programme as the Megalomatrix, the Fool, the Dog, and so on should have anchored the episodic work but the choreography's bleeding obviousness instead made us wish these personalities would go away so we could get more action from the Pack. When this ensemble storms around in unison, Miller’s invention soars, multiplying the power of her twisted, muscular shock movement, enhanced by a lighting scheme that at times casts the dancers in a spectral shimmer. They leap toward the wings, arms raised in front of their bodies with hands clasped (an unusual and virtuosic posture for a leap for it prevents you from using your arms to gain elevation.) Crouching on one knee with arms wide and fists pressing into the ground, they stare at the audience with the air of wild animals poised to pounce. In a signature move, they pop up and crunch their abs, grabbing their heels before landing with an impressive thud.
Miller’s interest in “pack mentality” apparently grew after viewing Head On, artist Cai Guo-Qiang’s massive installation created originally for Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, in which 99 lifelike snarling wolves dash headlong toward a glass wall. They trace an arc from floor into the air, some smashed against the glass, others in a heap below it, their trajectory inscribing a loop as the wolves defiantly return for repeated attacks on the wall. An episode in WONDERLAND replicates this fearsome exercise, with a tall dancer who stands impassively while the others hurl themselves at his ribcage.