The opening is arresting: eleven dancers stand in a row, facing the audience. Attired in janitorial midnight-blue jumpsuits, their motionless, emotionless presence hints at something ominous, unsettling.
They stare at us. We stare at them.
Then, movement breaks the standstill. Heads quiver; bodies drip to the floor. In canon, billowy port de bras open the arms all the way to the side, (just so you know, canons will appear regularly). To gushing, note-filled Rachmaninov, a ballet of striking workers or social-justice protestors ensues. Piqué pas de bourrées and raised fists interchange with equal esprit.
The group, rather than the individual, is the unit of performance in Oona Doherty’s Navy Blue at the Joyce Theater, in association with Irish Arts Center, and a HARKNESS FIRST Joyce Theater debut with support from Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels. Authentic expression of one’s inner nature is swapped for the aims of the bloc until the very end.
The 47-minute piece unfolds in three parts, which I dubbed the reckoning, the reveal, and the release. In the reckoning, the cast employs the weapons of ballet – pointed feet, exacting configurations of the corps – to fight against the man or the machine that has fed them a steady diet of lies and exploitative conditions.
Eleven proves to be a divine number of performers. In lines, circles, clumps and columns, the odd-numbered arrangements display originality. A single row stretching across the stage has a central point while perambulating in a loop enables those on the far side to be seen through those on the near side.
As the ballet progresses, electronic booms interrupt the Rachmaninov. Impulses overtake a dancer, rupturing the unity. Before you know it, one after another has collapsed. Prone bodies litter the floor as the stagescape transforms into a groovy graveyard, all cobalt blue light and meaningful thrums of music. If this is the afterlife, then sign me up.
Well, perhaps not, because what occurs next is annoying. A voiceover of slam poetry and spoken word pontificates on the meaning of life. Like a college sophomore drunk on Jägermeister and their own hubris, the voice quotes Carl Sagan (the pale blue dot) to ultimately declare that existence is mostly meaningless, which is to say the math isn’t in our favor. How special can a person be? How much positive change can a person enact when you are so small, and your life is so short in a crowded society, a planet, a universe that has existed for more years than you can fathom?
Doherty points out that all the good stuff in life costs money. An accounting of what it took to produce Navy Blue occurs, and it is as mind-boggling as the size of the universe with its trillions of planets. If I heard correctly, from conception through this run at the Joyce, the amount is around a quarter million clams, give or take a few. Doherty’s conclusion after the speechifying: love one another and then die – a kumbaya cop out.
Maybe the meaning of life has been revealed, or maybe it hasn’t, but my biggest gripe was that this section relied on telling rather than showing. More dance and less lecture was what I craved.
So what’s left to unearth? The aftermath features one woman, shirtless, in a smudgy spotlight during a cathartic, thrashing solo, the gutsiest moment of the evening. The score by Jamie xx finally sounds like Jamie xx, with its sonic affability. The rest of the cast joins her and they hug it out in a culmination that functions like a warm cuppa.
