In a place where all struggle to connect
Seated on a sparse stage at REDCAT, a dancer wears a placard that reads “Estoy desesperado” (I am desperate). But it quickly turns out that Pablo Lugones isn’t the only dancer who’s desperate. His three colleagues -- Lucas Condro, Noelia Leonzio and Alejandra Ferreyra Ortiz -- are desperate too, each in his or her own way.
In fact, the effort to connect -- and the fear and avoidance of connecting -- informs all of Diana Szeinblum’s poignant and complex dance-theater piece “Alaska,” which opened Thursday at REDCAT, in partnership with the Skirball Cultural Center.
An Argentine choreographer who trained with German post-Expressionist dance maker Pina Bausch, Szeinblum writes in her program that her Alaska is not a place but a metaphor. It’s “a supposed interior space,” the body “as a container of memories, where everything that has not been said of a personal experience is kept.”
“Alaska,” she writes, is “a place we all know but nobody has ever been.”
The memories play out on a huge white square bounded on its perimeter by chairs, a table with coffee mugs and carafes of water and, at stage right, composer-pianist Ulises Conti and violist Mariano Malamud, who provide music that is amplified and sometimes electronically modified.
The square can be viewed as a closed, claustrophobic space, except that the dancers can leave it to take a break, have some water or coffee, or just observe whoever is left on it. This play-within-a-play set-up perhaps unwisely keeps the audience from caring too much about the dancers and their struggles.
Lugones, for instance, may be desperate, but he’s also indifferent. Ortiz is drawn to him, jackknifing her body maniacally to get his attention. He glances at her sometimes, but doesn’t react.
Ditto when Condro hurls himself across the floor in a ritual of twisted pain that ends with his tearing off his pants. When he realizes how much he’s exposed himself literally and emotionally, he starts to pull them back on. But now Leonzio hurtles onto his back and struggles with him to keep the pants down. Some in the audience found the moment funny, but it illustrated the fact that in “Alaska,” women’s desire is usually thwarted.
Later, when Lugones and Leonzio are on the verge of a sexual tryst, Lugones suddenly pulls away to beat out crazy rhythms on his chest with a metallic spoon.
Just about every effort to connect in “Alaska” fails. There are a lot of walking wounded here. Condro kisses Lugones; again he doesn’t react. Yet earlier he had reached out to him. Condro appreciates Ortiz too late; she’s now a dead thing.
There are many episodes, too many perhaps, in the roughly hourlong piece that seems to end several times before it actually does.
Still, throughout the evening, the dancers are superb. Conti’s score also makes a powerful impression, ranging wonderfully from extreme outrage to passages of lyric, soothing beauty. Both musicians play beautifully.
Szeinblum is wrong. Alaska is not a place where nobody has ever been. She’s taken us there.
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‘Alaska’
Where: REDCAT, Walt Disney Concert Hall, 631 W. 2nd St., L.A.
When: 8:30 tonight
Price: $20 and $25
Contact: (213) 237-2800; or
www.redcat.org
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