A Physical Testament to Human Resilience

Materializing on a projection screen at the back of the stage in UCLA’s Freud Playhouse, the words “Somehow, continue” tell you the action plan and theme of “our brief eternity,” an hourlong, end-of-century statement by Vancouver’s Holy Body Tattoo about indomitable human resilience.

The Canadian company began a four-night campus engagement Wednesday, using a high-impact contemporary vocabulary to take its three dancers beyond displays of prowess and control to the edge of imminent breakdown and even collapse. Their triumph came from not just surviving the ordeal, but showing how human individuality can also prevail.

Choreographed five years ago by Noam Gagnon and Dana Gingras, performed by them and Susan Elliott, punctuated with a text by William Gibson and Christopher Halcrow and accompanied by both Jean-Yves Theriault’s powerful rock score and William Morrison’s feverish film of the dancers, the work represents a rare multimedia collaboration that ends up powerfully single-minded.

As the work races onward, strobes flash, smoke rolls in and the film editing grows ever more frenzied, but the result remains intently body-centered, offering plenty of visual variety but no escape from the potent, pitiless dance metaphor on view.

In a small, square space somewhat like a boxing ring, the dancers execute relentless cycles of repetitive, punishing tasks, facing the limits of their endurance but able to somehow continue. They begin on their knees, hands behind their backs like prisoners, and then roll restlessly across the floor as the projected text tells us “we sleep in lavish shadow,” though a smoky half-light would be more accurate.

Rising and slumping back down, they soon form tight, military formations for passages involving unyielding, machine-like repetitions: rapid head-nodding, bowing at the waist, big scooping gestures. Sometimes the music stops and the action continues to breath-rhythms and, by the end, Gagnon, Gingras and Elliott are dancing to their own screams.

Delivered in fragments, the text supplies clues to what it calls “the extremity of this our age,” a time of “cages of thought, grey logics,” “refugee airports” and “a wilderness of signs,” when, however, you can still glimpse the “old century’s city lights.”

Occasionally, the words convey glimmers of hope: “The loss of an individual . . . reconfigures . . . the whole . . . Be vigilant.” But a promise of “the body’s transformation” never arrives for the dancers.

Unlike butoh, where extreme physical rigor may lead to a moment of transcendence--when the body breaks through to new possibilities--the members of Holy Body Tattoo have only small victories to savor on their march to exhaustion: a flash of rebellious anger, fleeting tenderness, maybe the memory of those city lights.

Then it’s back to the bleak task cycles that erode their energy and ability to stay in step but call from them something deeper. This is prime Samuel Beckett turf, a world of “I can’t go on. I’ll go on,” with Holy Body Tattoo not so much waiting for Godot as dancing for him--heroically.

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* Holy Body Tattoo repeats “our brief eternity” tonight and Saturday at 8:30 p.m. in the Freud Playhouse on the UCLA campus in Westwood. $35. (310) 825-2101.