“We are giants, lying here, who can make forests quiver,” says one of the narrators in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, recalling a shared childhood by the English seaside. She could have been describing the dancers and musicians in choreographer Noé Soulier’s riff on the novel, which touched down last week at the Joyce Theater for a brief New York run as part of the Dance Reflections by Van Cleef & Arpels Festival. The piece launched in 2018 at the Centre National de Danse Contemporaine (CNDC) in Angers, now under Soulier’s direction.
An entrancing wash of sound by Ictus percussionists Tom De Cock and Gerrit Nulens mirrored the energy of a sextet of dancers – or perhaps fueled it. Their distinctive kit of mostly small instruments occupied territory stage right and, though not visible from everywhere in the audience, seemed to include a vast array of bamboo, brass, glass and wood objects alternately brushed, tapped, pounded, scraped and bowed. While the faint howl of a siren responding to some urgent situation on 8th Avenue added a random element to the mix, the music’s brief flares and abrupt fades appeared precisely engineered to intensify the impression of a body wave, a spring-loaded jump or a slow-motion collapse.
To the clatter of bamboo, the tinkling of glass shards and the shimmer of Tibetan singing bowls, the dancers at first seemed to be testing solutions to a series of challenges: how to hurdle an invisible boulder, soundlessly (solution: a pas de chat); how to stabilize a tent in high wind (anchor one or both hands to the ground); how to dodge an invisible cyclist passing behind at speed (heels pop, spine arches, glance over shoulder.) They returned to them repeatedly, sometimes with a new twist, seeking to perfect them but always bound by the music’s short fuse.
Gazing curiously at one another, they soon found power in numbers. Their unison thrust kicks and lithe descents to the floor gradually drew us into their somewhat obscure mission. One dancer might prompt another with a kick in their direction or a hip check, carefully avoiding contact; navigating around someone sitting or rolling on the floor became part of the game, their elegant evasions carrying a gentle humor. Occasionally they stared up at a corner as if seeking inspiration in the stars, or gestured toward the musicians as if questioning a chair umpire’s call.
Stephanie Amurao and Nans Pierson grappled cerebrally and beautifully on the floor, their bodies pliant, limbs entwined like a living thicket. One would lock both legs around the other’s ankle and reach out to grab a foot in a joint lock reminiscent of aikido. Pushing and pulling, revamping their joint locks and rippling their upper bodies, they propelled themselves like a mollusk on the move to music like a cat asking to be let in.
Recitations of vivid passages from The Waves broke up the action, notably Meleat Fredriksson’s luminous delivery of the account of “Mrs Constable, girt in a bath-towel” with her “lemon-coloured sponge” bathing a young boy who later recalls: “Water pours down the runnel of my spine. Bright arrows of sensation shoot on either side. I am covered with warm flesh. My dry crannies are wetted; my cold body is warmed; it is sluiced and gleaming. Water descends and sheets me like an eel…”
The dance captures a similar intensity of feeling with which Woolf described everyday objects and occurrences. Yet it dragged in sections where a dancer would pull the skin on various areas of their body, test the rotation of an arm in its socket, or measure the distance from one point on the body to another. Perhaps meant to reinforce the idea of a dancer’s body as a finely tuned machine, these demonstrations failed to grip.
Most transcendent were those moments in which Yumiko Funaya streaked across the floor, her hands flashing as if flinging movements that had coursed through her into the wild. She banked and swooped with a skimming precision, her pivots and leaps so crisp it was hard to tell when she was in flight or merely glancing off the ground. Acquiring a sudden gravity, she spun around and released a burst of energy in a movement like a discus throw, again and again; like a contagion, the others started spinning and throwing and recoiling as the lighting turned dark red and the drums launched into a low ominous rumble.
Woolf was writing at a time of economic misery, political instability and rising authoritarianism across Europe. Even as she captured the mythic quality of childhood in The Waves, loss and alienation loomed. Dance has even less staying power than words – and these dancers seemed to know it, spinning their movements with increasingly desperate intensity, determined to make forests quiver.
