The Brooklyn Rail

The terms of service for Sacha Vega’s PINCH are bolded and neon. Before the dance begins, audience members view an LED screen hanging from the theater’s ceiling. Instructions flash in all-caps: FIND A SEAT. GET COMFORTABLE. PHOTOGRAPHY ENCOURAGED! NO FLASH MAMA. With these cues, Vega makes explicit her protocols for spectatorship. We have no choice but to be prepared.

Practices of preparedness form the thematic center of PINCH, Vega’s evening-length work presented in partnership with 3AM Theatre. Performed by Vega, Neva Guido, and Sophia Halimah Parker, with appearances by Tina Bararian, PINCH examines the condition of safety as it is drilled into physicality and psyche. The idea that safety is embodied and often choreographed is not new. We have heard references to “feeling safe” as a bodily sensation, and many of us know the scores of emergency preparedness (stop-drop-roll, duck–cover–hold on, run-hide-fight).¹ What makes PINCH a compelling contribution is its comedic unravelling of control—safety’s sometimes partner, and the force determining which bodies are afforded protection over others. In a frenzy of movement, dialogue, and sound (an energizing original composition by James Gentile and Zack Kelley-Onett), rituals of preparation spiral into chaos.

PINCH is a place. It’s also a family and a way of life. This is what Bararian tells us, appearing as the “Chief Safety Officer” in a video that plays three times throughout the performance. PINCH (the dance) develops throughout distinct scenes, between which the performers change costumes and employ props that signal shifts in setting. Early in the dance, Parker drags a corded phone attached to a water cooler from the wings, materializing an office for the three performers turned coworkers. Bararian’s scenes begin after a stage manager rolls a small TV onto the stage in a delightfully awkward transition that conjures the spiritual clunkiness of HR training sessions. Vega folds the dance’s different worlds into each other, linking scenes via visual and aural references. The red, futuristic-appearing workplace depicted behind Bararian mirrors the red fabric hugging the upstage wall of 3AM Theatre, as the three coworkers exchange corporate vocabularies of “shared values” and office “safe spaces.”

As the dance progresses, Vega deconstructs a tension between desires for collective safety and lurking self-centeredness. A rousing moment occurs when the trio, homogenized in matching blonde wigs and black berets, executes high knees and angular gestures in unison. Simultaneously flight attendant, lifeguard, and soldier, the performers’ rigid arms and open palms hyperbolize a mythic unity. Fortified against oncoming crisis, they smile and remind us that myths of safety require affective reassurance—that everything will, in fact, be okay. Later, Vega wears the wig and beret again, this time holding the headwear of her peers in her hands. It’s as if their heads are trophies; her back to the audience, Vega raises her arms as triumphant winner.

It is throughout these solos that PINCH prods at the defensive veneer cloaking security efforts and their often-violent categorization of bodies as threatening or non. The extreme control of Parker’s solo as “Ice Princess” reads as both balletic and authoritative, but her title pushes us to consider the militarized choreographies of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and their policing of bodies and borders. Guido performs as an unnamed force that I understood as crisis or risk, telling us that they are “the reason for exit signs, backup generators, thoughts and prayers, big red font.” They shine bright lights towards the audience as the stage darkens, suggesting surveillance, omnipresent and lingering. Speaking as a hand puppet that resembles a dog, Vega tells us her dog family is held hostage at the pound, and their release requires we name “five things” that make us feel safe. I think about how crowd work can feel like a hostage situation, an analogy that feels both glib and at home within PINCH’s serious games.

Yet PINCH is most effective in its resistance to operating pedagogically. When the dance concludes with scenes of close physical contact, it avoids equating safety with a saccharine togetherness. A final trio instead features bodies in a collective melt, establishing a dependency not easily interpreted in moralizing terms. The trio becomes a wrestling duet between Guido and Vega, who pin each other aggressively but consciously, somewhere between hazard and play. Parker observes the duet before whispering into Guido’s ear, an interaction that prompts Guido to throw Vega to the ground. Is Parker the seat of control? Is she instructing Guido and Vega on a vision of safety that necessitates risk? Or is she partaking in “watch, practice, and repeat,” a method of learning safety drills previously displayed on the LED screen?

In PINCH, we recognize the absurdity of competing safeties. There is an urgent need to be prepared, for sure, but there is also something laughable about controlling the uncertainties of living, regardless of diligent rehearsal. It is undoubtedly frustrating when we try to reconcile different visions of safety, when one’s understanding of a “safe space” infringes onto another’s. There is also something painfully comedic about the platitudes meant to substitute stronger safety measures. Safety is a dark comedy in its excesses: TikTok creators show us how to evade imagined predators, preppers rehearse Judgment Day, industries are built on manufactured fear. PINCH transcends the limited humor of these extremes. It digs elbows into authority, using the body to reshape the source material that instructs us on moving safely, stretching control toward its breaking points.

And still, PINCH’s momentum, its quickened pulse, brings me to the state of heightened attention associated with personal safety. I am aware of my surroundings. I keep my head on a swivel.