The Brooklyn Rail

“I recreate the same room each time I move, says the therapist I saw for years.” Abigail Levine sings to us, sitting in the dark beyond the stage. The other dancers rest quietly near the audience, gazing at an array of plastic shot glasses spread across the floor. They rise and charge as a group, plucking up cups and throwing them as they sweep upstage. The tinkle of bouncing, exploding plastic lingers, then quiets. Soon, the cast returns to pick up the pieces.

Six Quiet Dogs evokes a living room on stage, furnished with objects to be taken out, played with, then tidied up again. Baskets of oranges hang from the rafters, and the space is trimmed with floor-to-ceiling strips of butcher paper covered in scrawled marks. I get the sense that, like a child’s drawing pinned on the fridge, these sketches are sentimental, not just set decoration. Each mark is the trace of a movement, memories of dances that float behind the one we’re watching.

The work follows the logic of a wandering mind. Six Quiet Dogs ranges from cheeky to abstract to melodramatic in a way that feels human and familiar—like how people manage to contain cryptic specificities and oblique clichés, often right next to one another. The dance is almost a collection of small rituals, formed of obscure gestures and simple tasks. I have a theory that one string of movement on the floor comes from the various positions a baby takes while rolling over. The origins of a trio section, where the dancers push piles of pencils across the floor with their feet and thighs, are more mysterious.

The dance is accompanied by a chapbook of auxiliary writing. Levine tells a story about having a meltdown after a flight. In the performance, she speaks from the perspective of her child. In the chapbook, she speaks as the parent. She describes the tension between the two of them: her adult world (you have to put on your shoes) against her child’s (no shoes! there’s no reason!). Suddenly they come crashing together, when her child cries, “there’s no reason for anything!” Levine wants to laugh and weep as mother pushes child in a stroller out of the airport. It’s a precious moment of empathy, both of them leaving sad but resigned. You can feel Levine’s grief at being the bearer of bad news: sometimes, you have to stop questioning everything and get off the plane.

When watching Levine’s dances, I often return to a line from her bio, “Abigail’s work probes the cultural legacy of minimal and conceptual art, an engagement marked by both kinship and critique.” Unlike the cold minimalism of the museum, her approach evokes childlike wonder: a wide-eyed attention to detail and the hidden potential of mundane objects.

Early in the piece, Levine throws a handful of ping pong balls on the ground and Julian Barnett shoots out into the space, ricocheting limb against joint as he mirrors the chorus of hollow pops. The ping pong balls bounce to a stop, and so does he. Anna Azrieli rolls a fake plastic orange down her body, then a real one. The thud of a juicy orange hitting the floor contrasts with the light bounce and roll of dry plastic. Martita Abril and Kristopher KQ Pourzal run the open mouths of mugs along a concrete wall to produce an undulating ringing. In each moment, we are invited to listen as if for the first time.

Levine does with objects what dance does to the body: turning a familiar form into something strange, decorative, and artful.

And sometimes, the objects make the body into something new. Barnett, Abril, and Azrieli each rip a long sheet of tracing paper, stretching their bodies to extend the space between two points: one hand tearing, the other anchoring to the ground. In another section, the dancers float swathes of butcher paper over their heads, punching and snatching until the paper crumples, and their bodies crumple around it.

Listening, we discover, is full of contradictions. Abril delivers a spoken score about not listening, about how easy it is to make the motions of paying attention. Pourzal sings about a man who isolates himself in an attempt to know silence, only to hear the humming of his own blood and nerves. “When you are alone … silence is imagined not perceived.” Barnett delivers a list of words that set my teeth on edge, phrases like “soul patch” and “deliverista” alongside “marine heat wave” and “Orwellian thought police.” This is the noise of our everyday, a news cycle of devastation and punchy headlines written to increase digital engagement.

Later, Levine sings, “I forget the names of recently war-torn towns as I learn the names of new ones.” One page of the booklet reads “Mariupol / (radio, daily, early 2022) / Khan Younis / (radio, daily, late 2023).” This is how growing up in the American empire turns you into a child. You'll spend your whole adult life shaping your mouth around unfamiliar vowels, learning their weight in the world outside your sheltered home.

Among all the poetry, I find the most poignant moments still come from simple acts of play. In a final tableau, each dancer sets a coffee grinder on a chair, leans down to listen to its high-pitched whir, then belts out a corresponding tone. They walk back from their machines with a hand in the air, like they’re tracing the reach of a sound wave. I remember sitting in my childhood living room, listening to the vacuum and trying to match its pitch on the piano. It is at once a strange ritual, a compositional layering, and a children’s game. Sentimental but bare, off-kilter but melodic.