Review: 'Alaska' is bold, 90-proof dance

Dance review |

In the fearless, gale-force landscape of "Alaska," created by Argentinean choreographer Diana Szeinblum, bodies convulse and metamorphose in brutal phrases that read like symptom and remedy both. Like 90-proof dance theater, "Alaska" packs an amazing rush of raw, coursing energy into 60 minutes, all while playing subtly with the audience's need to assign meaning.

Physically and psychically, the curtain is up and the soundscape is on before the piece begins. A seated man waits onstage, bearing a placard that reads "Estoy Desesperado" ("I Am Desperate"), though he looks dull and patient. Eventually, a woman in a pleated schoolgirl's skirt runs out onto the stage beside him and pitches herself forward, her straight arms slicing the air behind her, her straight legs locked in a standing position. While her body tantrums, her face stays relaxed, even curious (the few fleeting glances she directs at the unresponsive man read like soft question marks). After innumerable repetitions, she seizes in a seemingly still, vertical position.

Then her hands — still bearing that plunging impulse — slap onto her upper thighs, pulling forward the inner flesh, again and again.

For the two women in the piece, impulse courses through the deepest strata of the body, whipping and slamming them into chaotic, sexualized tics and full-body torques. The men's movement phrases initiate in the extremities, and thus maintain more control (a foot, or the rotator cuff, or hands will hijack and drive their bodies into abstruse positions). Eventually, dancers seize overt control of each other, too — manipulating positions, tearing off clothes, grasping for leverage. Szeinblum lists her four mesmerizing dancers — Lucas Condro, Leticia Mazur, Alejandro Ferreyra Ortiz, Pablo Lugones — as "interpreters," and they do indeed have distinct physical personalities.

As the episodes unfold, it's hard to see how elusive and subtle the level of expression and transition has been, until one woman stands stage front, extending her arm high, and raises her fingers one by one into the air. The thundering of numbers that comes rushing into the brain feels to be the first time in the piece any gesture has borne a discrete definition.

Composer Ulises Conti, on piano, and viola player Mariano Malamud, positioned just off stage right, add tremendously to the work, enhancing both the mechanical thrust of repetition and the warm, heavy flooding that emerges later.

Jean Lenihan: jeanlenihan@comcast.net