The Brooklyn Rail

Dressed in casual street clothes, athletic shoes, and a bandana covering his head, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd casts an imposing physical presence as he strides across the stage and disappears behind the rear wall. We hear him rattling around, and then he slides open the curtain to reveal the stage door exit. We have to strain our necks to keep him in sight when he charges up the stairs into the audience. He calls out names as if he’s a teacher checking attendance. “Ah, there you are,” and tosses a wrapped mint. When he calls my name, does he mean me, or some other Karen? “Anyone I did not call?” he asks (that would be most of us), while balancing precariously on a stack of books that gradually collapses during his subsequent lecture.

For the third week of La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival, Lloyd’s Mooncry shares a bill with Jesse Zaritt and Pamela Pietro’s Dance For No Ending. Fresh investigations both, these works raise more questions than they answer. Lloyd is an emerging talent, whose impressive recognitions include Dance Magazine’s “25 to Watch,” and a recent fellowship with the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Public Library Library for the Performing Arts. Zaritt and Pietro are respected educators: Pietro is Chair and Arts Professor at NYU’s Tisch School for the Arts; Zaritt is faculty with the new Bennington BFA Dance Lab. Thanks to the pioneering La Mama mission to champion work that pushes boundaries, we can witness the creative brain in action.

Lloyd’s casual persona alternates with short dance samples. We hear the sound of his oversized shoes slapping the floor in a jump lunge, then he stumbles and falls over. He scooches on one elbow to move upstage and we’re stuck with a view of his scuffed soles. With arms spread wide, he pops his chest so sharply I wince. He creates challenges for himself: while balancing on one leg in a tilted arabesque, he scissor-hops to change legs, wobbling. Splayed on the floor, his legs float unanchored in the air. It’s not pretty and it doesn’t make me laugh. But I am curious.

Much of the show takes place under a glaring stage with house lights raised, as if to erase the boundary between audience and performer. Maybe we can accept the premise that we’re in this experience together, but we still look to Lloyd for what he will do next. The parting image is a kinetic sculpture—a deconstructed version of a motorcyclist riding into the sunset? A henna colored wig hangs off a spindly mic-stand, its long strands blowing in front of a fan, underneath the red light of an exit sign.

After intermission I notice a large bag of trash downstage, house right, as if waiting in the wings. Dance For No Ending opens on a fleshy leg and arm entering from upstage right. Like cartoons where the bad guys are frozen in the headlights, Zaritt and Pietro flatten themselves against the raw theater wall. Both in clunky athletic shoes, they proceed on a murky journey along the back wall. Zaritt sports an iridescent shirt and matching Bermuda shorts; Pietro wears quilted sweatpants with an animal print halter top. In a tight embrace, they squeeze and tangle their way over and around each other as if confined to an improbably narrow passageway. They grunt audibly. They could be mating dragonflies, or a pair of hardcore wrestlers brawling. It’s hard to decide.

Once they stumble onto the pile of trash, they begin to throw, drag, and sweep a variety of props onto the stage: rolls of tape, markers, foam rollers, a large black exercise mat, folding chair. Pietro lies atop a padded stool on wheels, arching into a glamourous car hood ornament. Then she hops off and beats the heck out of the stool with a foam roller. She drags a prone Zaritt by the arms as if he was another object to throw into the fray. Zaritt stretches his calves at a picnic bench and Pietro rides in on a rolling coat rack. Oh. They’re arranging a workout space! They knock things over, scatter the trash bag contents, practice squat jumps, all while a familiar-sounding dramatic melody plays. (Among the recorded sound sources are “Nadia’s Theme” by Barry De Vorzon and Perry Botkin Jr., and “Smalltown Boy” by Bronski Beat.) Helpfully, a program note tells us “this duet is an experiment in accumulation and dissolution.”

As if rewinding, the two performers suddenly switch to clearing the space and engage in a brawling duet centerstage. With Zaritt in downward facing dog, Pietro crawls underneath and the two wrap around each other, limbs akimbo. When Zaritt stands, Pietro clambers up to grab his raised fist. They embrace and roll, intimate and messy as mucking around in oozing mud. Zaritt uncrinkles a wad of paper from the floor and sits like a child to draw, miming as he mumbles a description of his subject: “gorgeous hair, a lot of volume; small mouth, she’s crying.” He rips up the drawing. An animated black-and-white projection draws all eyes to the wall where a roughly outlined row of over-sized figures (Zaritt’s art) dance to disco music.

Meanwhile Pietro yells at the audience through a megaphone: “I have an announcement to make!” She leans back over her stool, “I can’t understand. We spend 80 percent of our time in flexion and 20 percent in extension.” In a solo of backbends, squats, and beautiful balances, she flings an arm as if slapping, flips her hair, raises and lowers flexed arms as if a robot. She both flows and tenses—another kind of accumulation and dissolution. She stuffs bunches of paper under her shirt, then layers her body with as many props as she can, including slinging a folding chair over her shoulder (a symbol for consumerism?). Liturgical music plays. She waddles across the floor like a duck, her chest bloated, trailing papery tail feathers.

When Zaritt takes the focus in a solo, he moves with the intensity of a ninja tiger—fluid, leggy, his energy jagged. He rocks an impressive set of pull-ups on the coat rack, making geometric shapes that remind me of Keith Haring graffiti and visually connect to the opening wall duet and the line dance of the projected animation.

The performers end up back at the wall, with bits of trash flying out from beneath Pietro’s shirt, while two spotlights roam the floor. What are they looking for? We know from the title, this dance has no ending. As the lights go down, one assumes the cycle of build and destroy, ebb and flow, over-eat and diet, the very act of breathing itself—will persist.