The Brooklyn Rail

Heat, Anna Thérèse Witenberg’s directorial debut recently restaged at Kestrels, begins in the dimly lit aura of a jazz club. A spotlight shines onto the piano player, Jack Whitescarver, turned away at his instrument in the corner of the space. The moment exudes an air of classic drama, already invoking a relationship to narrative glamour that will evolve throughout the piece. This opening moment draws on for a while as the music builds into a melodic crescendo that carries whiffs of cinematic potential, a street scene, a romantic entanglement. As this crescendo, like the moments of tension to come, finally breaks, the melody unravels and disperses into a new configuration of relationships. It’s a telling opening for a piece that will continue to play at the building and breaking of its own parameters, the weight of its own drama.

When two dancers, Rachel Gill and Witenberg, emerge into the space holding hands, they do so with vigor, immersed in their own complicity. They cross the space diagonally, cutting through the plane over and over in unison lines of coupé jeté. Their movement is virtuosic, intensive, consuming. It showcases a kind of bravado, an air of showmanship, reveling in the charge of being watched. And yet, the dancers also appear wholly immersed in their psychic landscape, as if consumed with the exorcism of an illegible inner intensity shared between them which incites their adversarial bond. The two keep careful watch of each other, evoking a compelling alchemy of desire and envy that swirls throughout the piece. Like the opening, this moment gets sustained beyond its rational end, the two continuing to beat across the room in their uniform swings, heightening the draw of tension. The gaze is held here. It lingers on this rhythm, this pace of breath, compelling you into its vortex. The moment is pushed to a kind of sensuous limit, a visceral edge, pulses there, and then fractures. Witenberg and Gill break into a tumultuous circulation, running around the space, then collapse into the caress of fallen angels-lovers-sisters. The moment bears the full gravity of its drama surprisingly well. It openly embraces the grandeur, the seriousness of this occasion, and in doing so alleviates it of pretension. Here, the light dims, the music begins in the drone of a kind of subterranean club or extraterrestrial atmosphere, and a third dancer, Josie Bettman, appears, creeping in along the backwall, her shadow contorting in the grips of some inner torment. Witenberg and Gill turn their gazes on Bettman, their partnership now reconfiguring in light of this new figure as Bettman’s movements evolve from a kind of monstrous, agonized pleading to a sharpened seduction.

As Heat advances, it continues to shift through new planes of desire, transitioning between triangulated intimacies that are suffused with glamour, horror, and tenderness. The trio finds new formations, pairings, and solo exhibitions as we trace the complex lines of desire and opposition between and among them. It’s by virtue of these relational experiments that Heat accomplishes a stunning exploration of the inexorable duel of attraction. That is, the piece finds its vitality in its animation of the nuances of attraction, where attraction is not merely a unitary affection, but a live, continual contestation of difference and similarity, competition and desire, envy and tenderness, ferocity and vulnerability, erasure and multiplication.

Perhaps even more compelling, however, is this piece’s flirtation with its own theatricality, the surprising ease with which it is able to alternately invest in the full-bodied weight of its drama and play off of it, teetering along a narrow line in reality where the stakes can be at once passionately serious and openly campy. Over its course, Heat excels at building, deepening, then breaking spells of tension. In one moment, Gill emerges slowly from the back of the space holding a white stool above her head. She creeps forward in silence, balancing precariously on her own feet, gradually drawing all our attention toward her. We persist here until, suddenly, Gill drops the stool onto the floor in a clatter, shattering the veil of this moment as we drop into a new reality. This careful and sensuous cradling of attention contrasts moments of playful theatrics. Just a few beats after her tumult with the chair, Gill repositions herself behind the piano, then delivers a note to Bettman who’s been crumpled against the back wall with Witenberg in their vigil. Bettman grabs the slip of paper in a farcical imitation of brusqueness, and it’s as if we’ve all been transported to the silly rendition of a sitcom. Heat pokes fun at tropes like this one throughout its evolution, morphing through deeply sensual and visceral phases as well as lighthearted caricature. By its end, Witenberg, Bettman, and Gill merge together, nearly crumbling into each other’s arms, gently rocking, whispering to one another as the lights dim on their dreamy escapade.