The Brooklyn Rail

The quickest read of Kimberly Bartosik’s bLUr, world premiering at New York Live Arts, is as a study of emergency. The show’s program describes it as a “landscape of physical and emotional crisis” inspired by an unspecified traumatic event, with a tightly timeboxed, 47-minute duration. But, true to its title, the work allows the audience to soften their focus on what it is “about” in a literal sense. In this way, bLUr looms larger and more abstract.

New York Live Arts’s dark stage remains unadorned throughout the performance, with only pale, translucent curtains wafting from the wings. Stage lighting design is also minimal, allowing the audience to see and be seen more so than the average concert dance performance. Notably, lighting design assistants River Bartosik-Murray and Ari Barash traverse the edges of the stage, panning handheld lights over the five dancers (Burr Johnson, Joanna Kotze, Ashley Merker, Jacoby Pruitt, and Donovan Reed). The impression is of illumination or surveillance or both. Costumes by Harriet Jung include athletic-looking shorts and tops, exposing limbs and torsos and varying dancer to dancer. Their colors are shimmering rich reds, greens, and golds, which feel surprising, and perhaps discordant given the stripped-down nature of the stage design.

Sirens dominate a sound score by Sivan Jacobovitz, keeping the audience alert. All five dancers enter the stage as if cued by the sirens, vaulting into the air with split-legged jumps and straight arms, and lurching through perilous-feeling spins. Their energy is frantic and alarmed. The dancers’ overlapping shadows grow and shrink in size as they orbit the stage. Though the choreography diverges greatly from Bartosik’s background as a member of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, or from other heavily technical styles, a vocabulary of repeated shapes and movement patterns emerges. Dancers drop to the ground, alternately lying flat separately or together, hunching their shoulders, or extending expressive hands and feet as though to search for something in space. At one point, a pair logrolls upstage, entangled. They slither into piles, forming shadowy sculptures of limbs and hair. They seem to meet each other’s bodies collarbone-first and slide off softly and silently. Later, dancers gather sitting downstage and perform arm movements that feel like a resuscitation, pushing toward the floor as if onto an imaginary patient. In quieter moments, the score mimics heartbeats, and aligns with the weighty breath audible from the dancers’ exertion.

The pitch of the performance rises as though the emergency looms upon us, crescendoing when the dancers contract toward center stage for what Bartosik references in interviews as the “vibrating section.” With compelling endurance, all the dancers shake together. Their urgency surpasses jubilance into alarm, then hints at lust. They shake so hard that they wobble out of their shirts, littering the stage with glittery debris. Each dancer presents differently: Kotze beseeches the sky with upthrown arms, Reed’s head takes a wild journey of its own, Merker shivers, and Pruitt and Johnson both take a moderately sensible bounce.

Finally, the music cuts out and the ensemble stops, sweat-glazed and breathing heavy; the dancers’ feet tangle and overstep each other. They lift Kotze flat and high in the air, leaving Reed writhing on the floor. Dancers crawl, overtaking and settling into the planes of each other’s bodies, then gradually leave the stage.

Eye contact is notably absent in bLUr: never with the audience, and rarely among the dancers. The literal lack of focus is disorienting and points to the container Bartosik creates, which presents like a collective dream state. We are outside of it, and it feels lurid to be onlooking. Relatedly, “front” becomes a relative term, because the movement largely unfolds in a circular path. If anything, the focal point is center stage, drawing in the dancers with centrifugal force.

Frank O’Hara’s poem “To the Film Industry in Crisis” urges its reader: “In times of crisis, we must all decide again and again whom we love,” and Bartosik’s work points to a similar sentiment. Inside of the centrifuge, the dancers repeatedly place themselves in each other’s space with a sense of gentleness and care. But also, the universality of an emergency (in the past, present, or feared future) renders bLUr’s urgency resonant and personal, beyond the action happening onstage. Bartosik offers a thoughtful exploration of emergent states, which left me wondering if we were all inside of the metaphorical ambulance together, after all.