The Brooklyn Rail

Watching Netta Yerushalmy’s Movement is a little like taking a BuzzFeed quiz (as in, “if you can identify more than fourteen of these moves, you are a genius dance watcher”). The work samples phrases from a roster of such well-known dance makers as Merce Cunningham, Tere O’Connor, Joanna Kotze, Pam Tanowitz, Seán Curran, Doug Varone, and many more. In the seventy-minute work, performed by a gifted ensemble of seven at NYU Skirball (it was first presented in New Jersey by PEAK Performances at Montclair State University in 2022), Yerushalmy and her creative team mine the formative elements that define them as dance artists, then weld together borrowed phrases, gestures, and counts to create a new whole. Movement is all about influence and attribution, and it raises questions about what constitutes a unique voice.

The work opens on Caitlin Scranton, seated as if ready to launch into a Martha Graham floor sequence. She is joined by a spritely Hsiao-Jou Tang, who wiggles her hips in a wide plié. Others peer from around corners, or venture shyly from the wings. Catie Leasca flexes her wrists like an Egyptian goddess and takes a reclining shape downstage. The sturdily-built Christopher Ralph moves with the buoyancy of an Irish step dancer. Burr Johnson towers over everyone, hairy chest poking from the bib of his overall-like costume. After Joyce Edwards crashes onto the stage with a cartwheel, Johnson comically flaps his hands near his face like a flustered damsel. The lithe Jin Ju Song-Begin straddles Edwards’s shoulder like an equestrian. The ensemble presents a diverse blend of body size and movement styles, unified by designer Magdalena Jarkowiec’s costumes in the same shade of neon green. Throughout these opening moments, composer Paula Matthusen’s score sounds a repetitive beeping, as if someone has left the refrigerator door open.

I’m on the lookout for identifiable moments of choreographic style as the dancers deftly slip from one sequence to the next without landing on a particular theme. What jumps out are bits of social dance, like the Electric Slide, kickline, salsa, square dance, grapevine, twerking. Tang and Song-Begin perform a series of bows to each other. A lateral arabesque acquires a hint of Bharatanatyam when Tang flexes her wrists and ankles. Downstage, a dancer can’t quite fit their limbs into the desired pretzel of a yoga pose. In a rare long sequence, the ensemble appears to be at a club dancing to a disco beat with a flashing strobe and the entire stage awash in pink light (by Tuçe Yasak). Johnson hits the floor for a series of macho push-ups with a clap between. When the group splits into twerking couples, the house lights go up, as if to invite the audience into the bawdy experience.

Only once the ending credits are projected onto the rear scrim do I realize the choreographer is sharing her own origin story, and that of each of her performers. Movement is a mixtape of personal training notes, the moments dance first caught them in its headlights, the roles they learned, the parts they originated, the performances that remain lodged in their visceral muscle memory. Each movement sample can be directly connected to the show’s performers. “Arm movements from The Radio Show (2010), as choreographed by Kyle Abraham” for example, is completed with this defining bit of personal history, “performed by Hsiao-Jou Tang as her first full-time dance company job after graduating from college.” The complete list of credits runs to twelve pages (dramaturgy by Katherine Profeta).

Like the work itself, the credits roll faster than I can absorb them. The most compelling notes detail formative, non-professional beginnings. For instance, we get four counts of eight from “Dance Break, ‘I’m A Slave 4 U’” (2001), as choreographed by Brian Friedman, to the song by Britney Spears. As learned by Christopher Ralph off a TV screen, and performed as an important part of parties with friends.” Also two counts of eight from, “‘Somewhere’ (2006). Solo choreographed by Donnamarie Lindgren for eleven-year-old Catie Leasca, to Michelle Nicastro’s cover of ‘Over the Rainbow.’ Lyrical dance style, sometimes with Christian references, as popular in small US dance studios and larger US dance competitions.”

I can feel lightbulbs going off around me as it kicks in that Movement is a living example of how dance is archived in the bodies of the dancers who’ve learned and performed it. The personal histories are what lend this work its unique voice. By the time the performers take a bow, we’re on our feet hooting and hollering with appreciation. This seems almost too late. I want to re-run the show backward.