Room with a View is one of those pieces that starts as the audience is still filing in. With umbrellas dripping and galoshes squeaking, our eyes land on a woman in a crop top, her legs anchored in a generous second position. She steps in place, hips firing like pistons. Her punchy pacing matches the strident electronica that courses through the theater.
She is positioned in a rectangular enclave inside a set that evokes a marble quarry, all elegant swoops of stone and piles of crumbly detritus. Eventually, other dancers join her until the space is as jammed as a bus at rush hour. All pulse in that wide-legged stance, save for a bustier-clad woman and a man in a dress shirt, tie, and pedal pushers. (The costumes make no sense.) As young, attractive people are wont to do, they embark on the kind of relationship my sixteen-year-old self thought meant true love. There are poetic embraces, blow-out fights, and intentional harm inflicted on the other.
More couples emulate this dark, violent romance. Sadists put their masochistic partners through humiliating acts: undressing them, tossing them around like bean bags, and toying with their emotions by running hot and cold. One woman whose abusive arc unfolds on top of and inside the rock quarry snaps. She wallops her partner with a rock that resembles a gravestone. His hands won’t hurt her anymore – good riddance, I say.
And that’s how the collaboration between (LA)HORDE, Rone (an electronic music artist whose 5th album gave the work its name) with Ballet national de Marseille says bonjour. The work occurs at NYU Skirball Center, presented as part of Dance Reflections, a festival by Van Cleef & Arpels. (If you’re in New York this fall, check out the tantalizing line-up of events.)
Part rave, part burn-it-to-the-ground protest, Room with a View explores crowds in pitched circumstances and how their impulses can flip from dark to light, and vice versa, seemingly on a whim or a well-dropped beat.
Often organized into clumps, the cast of twenty writhes as Rone manipulates electronics into soaring soundscapes grounded with peppy rhythms. They raise their fist and rage at … something or someone, I guess. They form a circle and grapevine in a madcap hora of sorts. These rebels without a cause shake their middle finger at us and shout and scowl and push each other around. There’s a mash pit or two with the obligatory crowd surfing.
Occasional sequences of pure dance bubble up from the tempest. The artists hurtle through somersaults and plunge to the floor. A duo on stage right, rockets through the type of movement phrases – whip-fast floor rolls, inversions – that leave bumps and bruises.
The imagery, sampled from front pages and social media feeds around the world, can be searing. As their name suggests, (LA)HORDE flaunts a knack for organizing all those clumps in textured, interesting ways. The performers manage the grueling tempo and repetitive physicality with nonchalant cheer, their wholesomeness sometimes at odds with the themes.
However, without context or purpose beyond repurposing, the production registers as ersatz. The catharsis of feeling the same thing at the same time with same-minded people never materializes as genuine. People go to clubs to release very real frustrations and to act on very real desires. Folks congregate at protests because they have very real gripes with the way society functions. Individuals scream profanity when they feel wounded or offended. So, what’s the beef here?
I couldn’t identify one. Thus, without standing for anything or standing up to anyone, the intimate partner violence, barbarity and gleeful rioting exist for gawking. Room with a View is basically fake news.
