The Brooklyn Rail

There are two ways to conquer a jawbreaker: lick to the center or buck up to its threat and bite. Either way it’s total fixation, a kind of frantic devotion to the candy and to a potentially destructive result (sugar-high or broken-face). This double bind forms the core of Alexa West’s Jawbreaker Part 1 Part 2, a performance that pushes its dancers into alternate states of slow and whiplash compulsion. Swaddled by Charlap Hyman & Herrero’s aqua stretch-wrapped room—a life-sized candy wrapper and West’s most monumental dance environment to date—Jawbreaker confronts obsession and the nature of control within choreographer-performer dynamics.

Five dancers—Cayleen Del Rosario, Benin Gardner, Amelia Heintzelman, Molly Ross, and Isa Spector—announce themselves with a catwalk. It’s somewhere between military bootcamp exercise and nineties runway stomp, and in their all-American jeans the quintet looks like a Calvin Klein ad gone rogue. Their hypnotic strut, set to a thumping score, calls to mind another Jawbreaker: the 1999 teen-queen cult classic in which three high school socialites accidentally kill their friend by choking her with a jawbreaker. The film’s iconic stage is the high school hallway, an apt parallel for West as her Jawbreaker follows certain cheerleader logics: rote and repetitive movements, individualism and required cooperation, feats of strained and bewildering athleticism, a human pyramid. It’s the inevitable fall—from grace, toward something more sublime—that West attends to. Mid-strut each dancer collapses, one after the other, and over the course of Part 1—through a cavalcade of single and paired contortions, piqué twirls, and tweaked-out Bob Fosse flourishes—they keep struggling toward images of grotesque perfection.

West’s singular ability to isolate manic focus is on full display in Jawbreaker, as is her challenge to the audience to see it all. A dancer on all fours, slowly scanning the room, demands the same attention as one convulsing at its center. The spatial fragmentation of 99 Canal amplifies this disorienting simultaneity. Jawbreaker first debuted at Pageant, an artist-run performance space that West cofounded in East Williamsburg, where dancers were bounded by the loft’s side walls and backdrop of windows. At 99 Canal, West incisively shifts Jawbreaker’s axis and peripheries, making smart use of the split rooms and the opening between them. The passageway cuts and orders sightlines, a generative denial that serves to crop, distort, and hide the dancers’ bodies. It also functions as a trick mirror, making twins of the divided audience watching and studying the dancers and each other from opposite rooms. The rawness of 99 Canal’s pipe and brick-filled venue lends this iteration a colder, more hard-edged flavor, amping up its anxious impulses while stripping away a softness available in the more intimate and enclosed Pageant. This may operate to the piece’s detriment, as part of West’s brilliance is her ability to cast fixation as a strangely tender form of devotion. But it’s also a radically new version, and Jawbreaker’s second half magnifies these games of strange symmetry and unruly doubles.

Part 2 is announced by a blackout: one room goes pitch dark and its audience, now subject to West’s instructions, shuffles across the stage to join their pair. The dancers appear at ease in this more intimate arrangement. They strip and change at the room’s perimeter as though in a rehearsal studio, dousing themselves with water and pulling identical white costumes from behind the wall’s translucent skin—a clever move by the designers, the environment not simply a claustrophobic enclosure but a functional provider. From the wings, dancers peel green wrapping off a towering lamppost and push it to the stage’s center, the glass lantern quivering like a bell. Assembled using cut-and-ready parts ordered online, the lamppost is an emblem of industrial standardization that here becomes a centrifugal force of intense—irrational?—dedication. The dancers use it like a grounded balance beam, but it’s more ritual-object than gym equipment. They tap, leap off, and balance upon it; their outstretched toes graze the pole and, as though worshipping at the shrine of electricity, they pepper it with kisses. Taking to the lamppost in pairs, the dancers, newly synced, mirror each other in a looping routine. Each follows the same pattern until they complete their turn, exiting the stage and being replaced until Spector, the final performer, completes the cycle alone.

If Jawbreaker is a study of the rituals of devotion, its primal pair is West and her dancers. The piece offers a captivating exploration of the ever-shifting notions of selfhood, reliance, and agency at the foundation of dance; who is in control? While the performers command attention, West is a primary catalyst in Jawbreaker—its conceptual progenitor, of course, but a source of metaphoric and literal power as well. In Part 2, hidden within the crowd, West clicked a small remote to illuminate the lamppost. Before the dancers even took to the stage she opened the performance, if obliquely. Stationed within the central passageway as the audience first walked in was an amber-hued vessel that, a Charlap Hyman & Herrero architect informed me, modeled its curvature from the contours of West’s feet. The sculptural prop was soon whisked off-stage and went otherwise unused that evening, but it’s easy to envision its potential as a vessel for drinking and washing, the choreographer herself becoming an object at the service of her dancers.