The Brooklyn Rail

Fragments of a grainy video, handwritten notes on a piece of aged, line-ruled paper, and a few images of two dancers in a wood-floored studio in SoHo. That’s what Wally Cardona had to reconstruct David Gordon’s Times Four, a duet with Valda Setterfield that was created in 1975 and hasn’t been seen since. But with every slip of the performers’ weight, or a delicate brush of the knee, it felt as if time had collapsed. Same movements, same studio, but embodied in a vastly different time and landscape with the measured precision of faithful reconstruction.

After the three-year-long process of bringing Times Four into 2025, Cardona dances Gordon’s duet with Molly Lieber in the same SoHo space it was performed fifty years ago, and where Gordon and Setterfield, seminal artists of the postmodern movement, lived and worked for decades. Gordon, who had worked with Cardona on several choreographic and reconstruction projects already, reached out to Cardona a year before his death in 2022 about performing the duet. The result is an intense study of movement and space, where Cardona and Lieber, blank-faced but alert, chart constellations about the room and each other. The game is set immediately: movement is repeated four times, in four different directions, rotating clockwise to democratically give each facing—and the audience seated across each wall—a look at the sequence.

It starts off simple. A rock forward until the back pad of the foot lifts off the ground, and Cardona and Lieber’s eyes gaze out, beyond the walls that give structure to their movement. Incrementally, the sequences become more complex, until eventually it’s a challenge to distinguish the steps of the sequence. The repetitions bleed into one another as the dancers begin to incorporate corners into their shared orientation, or start the sequence facing one another as opposed to the same direction. It’s a bit geometric, like a flower of life; loops repeat and overlap each other until you can’t tell where one circle ends and another begins or if they’re even circles at all.

While the pattern becomes ornamental and meditative, the movement is slippery. Weight seems to pour from joint to joint, sliding down limbs. Each step is an exercise in measuring the body’s own architecture, and allows the dancers to twist, fold, and fall until they come to a neat stillness. Somewhere in the sea of movement, Cardona and Lieber drape their head over to the side, gently slumped like they’re resting their temples on a table, and a knee gently floats up. At another point, the dancers’ joints fold until they find themselves on the floor, rolling back with a leg stretched until the ball of their foot just barely brushes the floor. Then their legs collapse into their joints again, letting the weight slide until they unfold back to standing upright. It’s a dance of conflict and resolution, a marble dropping in a Rube Goldberg machine until it reaches a satisfying conclusion.

Measured but soft, placed but loose—Times Four is a task-oriented dance through and through, an aesthetic hallmark of the Judson Church performances of which Gordon was a founding artist. An addition by Cardona—where the dancers strip back four layers of pants and four layers of shirts, one sequence at a time—is a playful poke at these values. This also makes it, at times, a challenge to stay engaged. The wide open, long stare Cardona and Lieber wear feels ascetic and a bit detached. They appear to look past one another, not recognizing the other body in their space, running on separate but parallel train tracks.

But there are moments when the commitment to the task at hand brings Cardona and Lieber into relation with one another with breathtaking intimacy. When they spring into a jump, knees swiping up into a tuck, negative space gapes between them, a wide yawn. As their weight sloshes, the space collapses again, and there’s a tension between the loose falls and the precise measuring of space that brings them within a hair’s breadth of one another. The relationship is not intentional; they never seem to recognize that they’re in the same space, playing the same game, completing the same task. Instead, it’s a delicate consequence of the sequence and the gravitational pull of their weight. Like magnets attracting and repelling each other, Cardona and Lieber draw together and bounce back when they come too close.

Gordon, it seems, treated movement like a web of possibilities, and here we see how each choice affects the outcome. A dance between action and reaction, Times Four twists something up and lets the body’s architecture sort it out. The work resolves itself as much of the comprising movements did. After Cardona and Lieber have charted a complicated pattern of lines, circles, and squiggles across the floor, tying their own pattern into knots, they trace the outside of the room in a wide arc. The duet closes with a severing of the pattern, a breath of fresh air, and a gentle settling.