The Brooklyn Rail

The dramatic love triangle substantially predates the phrase “attention economy”; even the Greek gods, at the onset of Western civilization, were cheating on each other. Yet that’s all a ménage à trois really is: the human failing to focus on just one object at a time, to appreciate what’s right in front of us at the expense of other options.

I thought about this connection while watching the first movement of Lovers’ Discourse unfold. The production, choreographed by Mamie Green of LA-based Volta Collective, began with a dancer in orange shorts, a white button down, and a tie, stranded somewhere between man and boy. He stood in the Ace Hotel Brooklyn’s makeshift lobby art gallery, back to the audience, looking at a photograph by Ace artist-in-residence Alex Yudzon. It featured pieces of furniture leaning against each other in precarious equilibrium. A female dancer approached, drawing him away from the art and toward her. The pair were in duet for a moment, close and connected, until another male dancer entered the frame. This third element created separation and tension amid the initial two dancers. Gentle touch coalesced with more combative movement, a punch thrown, as the dancers staked their territory. This complicated trio found itself in a new, dynamic arrangement, as intriguing as it was unstable.

And right when this configuration had all my attention, the dance shifted to a different venue, at the lobby bar, and the audience shifted too. A new assemblage of four dancers began to push and pull at each other under green light. The performance had advanced from its “Ravishment” movement into “Jealousy.” Multiple competitions came into play: between art and love, one partner and another, narrative continuity and rupture.

The entire performance spanned five separate movements, across five spots in the hotel lobby. Quotes from Roland Barthes’s 1977 A Lover’s Discourse framed each movement. While the volume offered Green a clever way to arrange her work, its role in the performance seemed more architectural. Amid the dancing, the performers also recited Shakespearean monologues about love, which derived from six different plays. The audience became submissive to the performers, dominated by the dancers’ “come hither” gestures to each subsequent stage, and by the hotel architecture itself. Dimly lit, sumptuously adorned with art and rugs and wooden furniture, it was the venue’s job, too, to remind you of the pleasures of a bedroom that wasn’t your own.

The monologues, arranged by Dimes Square playwright Matthew Gasda, were at times deeply familiar, to the point of trope (“what light through yonder window breaks?”), and more obscure, though the sentiments remained eternal (“To pieces with me! O, Men’s vows are women’s traitors!”). Indeed, the performance effectively argued for Shakespeare’s continued relevance among a youthful, downtown milieu.

With so much going on, the monologue that most stuck with me was itself harried. In the third movement, “Concealment,” a dancer found herself alternately stranded between and tugged at by a male dancer and a female dancer (Green herself) who seemed more archetypal, lithe and reminiscent of a dark, fluid spirit. The Twelfth Night monologue, about whether or not to reveal one’s true self in love, concluded, “O time, thou must untangle this, not I. It is too hard a knot for me t’ untie” (the line “I am the man” also resonated with this millennial, who recognized the plot from the Amanda Bynes/Channing Tatum masterpiece She’s the Man). In this section, the recitation connected with the movement in the most memorable way, while a new tension emerged, between disguise and revelation.

Dancing in a public space allowed for spontaneity and unexpected resonances—and dissonances. The fourth movement, “Sex,” featured four male dancers who performed around a long table where a young-ish group of hotel guests worked on laptops and were otherwise plugged in, despite the late hour (it was around 9 p.m. by this time). While some of these inadvertent audience members looked up to enjoy the performance, or just to see what was going on, others kept staring into their screens. Their attention remained strictly on the project in front of them, at the expense of taking in the scene: men writhing around and on top of each other, reciting monologues from Antony and Cleopatra (“O happy horse, to bear the weight of Antony!”), beneath a passionate red light.

It’s a lot to ask an audience to keep in their head—the language, the movement, the rapid shifts between performer assemblages and sites—and I wondered if it had to be this way as our attention spans decline. My screen time is as abysmal as anyone’s, my experience of writing this review tainted by innumerable glances at my phone, sent text messages, email monitoring, and games of Tetris. Yet I would have watched the dancers much longer, focused entirely on Green’s choreography. I liked being immersed in this particular, youthful scene, within these passionate affairs in which true love remains just out of reach. The ephemeral movement evoked turbulent romances of my own past, now reachable only in memory. I was seduced.