The Brooklyn Rail

Before the North American premiere of R.O.S.E., the scene in the Park Avenue Armory’s lobby looks much like it would at any other New York dance show. Audience members trickle in wearing work clothes or dressed up for a night out; they stand chatting in groups, or alone, checking their phones, waiting for the house to open. Usually, they’d be anticipating sinking into seats and waiting for the lights to go black, letting their focus shift to the dancers as they play out their role in the audience/performer contract. But tonight is different.

At R.O.S.E., the dance-cum-rave production choreographed by Sharon Eyal and co-directed by Gai Behar and Caius Pawson, the audience is ushered into the Armory’s vast Wade Thompson Drill Hall, designed to look like a nightclub. Risers surround a dance floor, with just a handful of seats available for those who need them. The air is dense with piped-in fog, adding a sense of drama to the lights (designed by Alon Cohen and Brandon Stirling Baker) cutting through the dark. DJ Ben UFO plays loud, trance-like dance music, responding in real time to the vibe of the room. Slowly, the audience starts to react, bopping along to the electronic beat.

Thirty or more minutes pass before the dancers enter. When they do, I’m waiting in line at the bar. I abandon my spot and push through the crowd to get a better look, but I can see them only in fragments. The nine performers—all members of L-E-V, Eyal and Behar’s company—are dressed in tan lace lingerie separates, designed by Maria Grazia Chiuri, the creative director of Dior. Their eyes are rimmed in dark liner, and some have red tears dripping down their faces. They wear chunky silver rings and facial piercings; their hair is slicked back with gel, or woven into intricate braids. Combined with their bound, robotic movements and dead eyes staring straight ahead, they barely look human.

Eyal’s style, which she developed following her years as a dancer and choreographer for Israel’s Batsheva Dance Company, is made up of dancers contorting their bodies in unexpected ways and repeating small, highly-controlled movements. When viewed on a proscenium stage, it appears striking and virtuosic. From up close, it’s eerie; the angular movements of the company members’ lithe, sinewy bodies evoke an uncanny valley-like feeling that’s kind of extraordinary.

The cast exits on relevé, their feet clad in thick, tan sport socks, and the crowd erupts in cheers. With the company gone, the DJ turns up the music, and the audience starts to dance in earnest. Over the two-plus hours that follow, this cycle continues: the dancers return unexpectedly every few minutes, sometimes joined by a group of twelve Juilliard School dance students (they’re distinguished by their black versions of the same costumes). Each time they leave, the audience members cheer louder and dance harder. The audience’s boldness bleeds into the performances that follow; they grow less cautious about making room for the dancers, and I see more than one onlooker get hit by an expertly pointed toe.

As the night continues, I move around the space more freely, less worried about seeing every step. Yet many stick with me: The dancers form a chain by holding onto each other’s ears; they grab their torsos with both hands and take a fighting stance from a deep second position, rocking their pelvises forward and back; they rotate their fists back and forth by their eyes, imitating a baby crying. During one chapter, the dancers, whose heads are now covered with lace hoods, wear hump-like backpacks, adding to the Butoh-esque sense of grotesquery. Sticking out of one dancer’s bag are dark-colored roses. She’s carried through the air with her arms and legs nearly touching behind her head and placed on a platform. After finishing a solo, she hands out R.O.S.E.’s eponymous flowers to audience members. I wonder if she’s acknowledging the blurred audience/performer roles by congratulating them on their participation.

In a pause between entrances, I leave to use the bathroom. As I walk into the brightly lit hall, I’m struck by how quickly the rave falls away behind me. According to the program notes, Eyal and Behar (who are life partners as well as creative partners) met at a club in the nineties, and have spent years figuring out how to bring contemporary dance into a club environment in the hopes of dissolving physical boundaries “to make the feeling of the work immediately intelligible.” But they’re not bringing contemporary dance to a club; instead, they’re bringing it to the Upper East Side, reconstructing a club using the same tools—music, costumes, lights—as any other performance. And the audience (which spans a much broader range of ages than you’d see at Berghain or Basement) seems to appreciate Eyal’s choreography without fully understanding it, or attempting to replicate it in their own bodies.

In the final performance section, the company moves in unison. As the audience claps and cheers, they flood the space where the cast had been and continue to dance. I wonder if they’re applauding more for the performers, or for themselves—if this group of New Yorkers is just grateful for the chance to move their bodies to music in the dark. Perhaps that was Eyal and Behar’s goal all along.