The Brooklyn Rail

Jade Manns’s choreography explores how multiple performers compose images of collectivity: collective life both as human collaboration and what is common that pervades life across all its forms and species. And yet, in Falling, her new work performed by Noa Rui-Piin Weiss, Kalliope Piersol, and Maxi Hawkeye Canion, the dancers never touch. It’s a notable difference only in that Manns has been a consummate maker of the human composite. A hallmark of her earlier work, like Things in The World (2023), was a succession of taut and static tableaux as performers wrestle, leap, and entangle with such tension and balance that, as additive parts, they compose the image of a collective body through their contact, before reshuffling to the next permutation.

Falling’s pressurized physical vocabulary shimmers between a collective force the dancers undergo and the distinct iterations it engenders in the language of each dancer, held apart. Its relation to Manns’s earlier work recalled for me how the centuries passed in chemistry class: each week, the discovery of the atom progressed with ever more empty space between its particles, with the next class discarding the last week’s model. Clumped solids turned to sketched spans with charged clouds and gaps. The more that matter’s model hollowed, the more unpredictable the movements of electrons. Yet there was a reason not to start with the latest model, but to pass from one to the other: some lesson, perceived or not, in the way each model advanced a new conjecture for the next one to recompose in a history of scientific forms. In Falling, the separation of dancers seems to accomplish just as convincing a parallel of collective movement as Manns’s prior work, this time through a kind of relation without mirroring, where each dancer explores a distinct language for much of the piece’s three sections, each beginning with a solo. And yet the manner in which they each pursue their own vernacular—whether it’s Weiss’s lithe turns and rolls of his ankles and wrists, Canion’s slicing palms across her temples and on all fours her revved fists, or Piersol’s stuttered divots with her hands pointing down from her locked and raised arms—envisions a shared nature in the singularity of these developments, the same distortions done to different gestures.

In Kingdom (2024), Manns’s next work after Things in The World, her compressed tableaux heated up into more volatile particles as she invited the animal as a cipher and motif, using images from National Geographic or Chauvet Cave paintings as references to generate the piece. They first appear like hieroglyphs, animals as human signs, and then leap into stylized wildness, roving hunt and courtship. But the decidedly formalist bent of Things in The World appears in miniature toward the end of Kingdom, ensconced within its solos and duets. Similarly, Kingdom’s animal solos recur in Falling, where they play a less thematic role. Just as Manns seems to fold one new performer—this time Canion—into her group of longtime collaborators like Weiss and Piersol for each new piece, her work’s partial continuities help to render its leaps legible as new conjectures toward her serial theme

With Superposition (2025), Manns began to pivot from the primacy of images in crafting her work, now prying them open with a more kinetic intensity. Pared back from the symphonic multitude of Kingdom, which walked the earth, Superposition’s movement is more protozoan at first. It is anchored by a duo in constant rolling embrace, separating and reconnecting, often just tempering the weight of the other. A still image would show similar arrangements to her prior work, but the constancy of its pressure would pass through that still like a sieve. Bodies whose rolling tension is like a pendulum telling time through the glass, without measured ticks.

Falling’s striking shapes show the cosmic wit in all of Manns's work. More akin to Superposition, it eschews an image like a mosaic where pieces amass into a social composition, as in Manns’s remarkably balanced early work. Nor is Falling the universal chorus of Kingdom as it brought that language into an evolutionary spawn. Falling has a more contrapuntal form, where what is common to all is articulated through differentiations and disjunctions in each dancer’s movements. We learn how to stomach the title’s plummet through a gravity that Manns has made new: where collectivity is not a mass but a force of relations, whose fugue-like unity is not encapsulated at any single point.

Toward the end of the piece, Canion begins a punctuated set of downward movements: one knee drops to the ground, then one hip, one arm—sharp movements in parts, staccato local collapses with no reverb throughout the whole—until she is fully prone and then resets. She is in the thrall of a force that dismantles but does not quite undo her body’s stasis, uncanny as watching the controlled demolition of a building, implosion’s mix of destruction and containment. Soon all three take up this procedure, riding a form made of segmented and suspended deformations. Even to say “implosion” is more of an analogy by way of its balance of tensions than it is a visual similarity or a thematic motif.

The brief synchronizations throughout Falling—a sudden coordinated roll, or a pull at the back of their knees which joined to spur another fall before a solo—function more like connective tissue than the piece’s core. The difference in the timbre of their solos allows these linkages to shine forward, but for the most part, their collective shape is in how their asymmetrical movements pull similar distortions, amplifications, detonations out of the air. Derek Baron’s sound design heightens this tension as an oceanic wash that occasionally laps out a single froth at the top of the wave, like a muted scream, before blending back into the soup of a more sedate sine wave. The sound’s role shifts when it surrounds mirrored movements rather than solos: it briefly turns cinematic, articulating the affect of Piersol’s solo in her searching and twitching head, whereas it feels more amniotic when it cloaks fetal sleepers toward the start. And the space of Pageant is so tightly drawn, cinched into a smaller room by an added white curtain-as-wall behind the risers. Bright bulbs aid an unrelenting vision against white walls, whose minimal backdrop intensifies the sheer amount of choreographic material, gregarious in all its bodily neologisms.

Manns’s choreography has a thing-ness and language to it all at once, and her sequences appear both to compose their own closed universe and to enact the world beyond it. Falling seems to let go of so much scaffolding, but its drop is just as much a new force imbued into Manns’s vocabulary as it is a falling away from prior references and procedures. The work is a breakthrough (or in the end, a breakdown) that enhances the richness of her whole corpus by continuing to amend its form of relation. They never touch. They fall together, in phases.