Anna Teresa de Keersmaker/Steve Reich Evening/ROSAS Dance Company

The piece started with two musicians that began a pendulum-like motion of 2 microphones that made a loud interference sound as they passed over a bowl-like structure. Both started from the same height at the same time but throughout the next ten minutes or so they became further apart in tempo, and closer together as they had less space to travel.

The rest of the evening seemed to play with complex rhythms that not only could be heard in different ways but, by virtue of their complexity and repetition, necessarily overlapped according to human error. It reminded me of the Kleist essay that tries to say that humans have no grace because something always messes with the perfect lines of gravity and geometry (their souls?). Reich and de Keersmaker showed us the beauty of the mistake and of the soul by offering us repetition or sound and movement until the main rhythm/movement became the background and the inconsistencies of the human body became the events in the foreground. Two dancers spun but didn’t match up exactly. Their shadows overlapped in the middle but remained separate on another part of the scrim on which they were reflected. They were practiced and précised so that the middle shadow often looked like one dancer, but the excitement for me came when the dancer/shadow in the middle split apart. I could suddenly see two elbows, two arms. Suddenly she was Ganesh with multiple arms and a single center. Likewise, the men on the vibraphone played the same five notes voraciously in a rapid, repetitive sequence and as they accelerated, they kept slightly different rhythms, playing in the inside and outside of the other’s rhythm. Then they found consistency again.

It reminded me a lot of mom’s work with coherency and resonating, and also of the sound and movement exercises we did in RasaBoxes. Like the feedback in the microphones, we hear and respond, perhaps unconsciously to the stimuli we receive. The musicians are at once unable to sustain the lightning paced speed exactly and metronomically but as they get off course (or as the dancers’ shadows split) they play/move in dissonance for a while but then find each other again. Miraculously though, through counting or communication, they end on the same breath…exactly.

After the microphones, and the 5-note spinning top dance we were suddenly bathed in movement and complexity. Steve Reich’s multiple-instrumented piece played while women in black, gray, and white costumes of flowing silk or tailored pants and vests moved on a star-like diagram on the floor, seemingly to their own pattern but almost serendipitously (but very deliberately) matching up in spaces and movements. It seemed like each dancer was following a specific part of the music – one girl was noticeably dancing to the flute that moved faster and higher than the other instruments – and retained their characters. Although the movement was abstract the dancers related to each other as human beings, reaching out to one another, touching one another, before being whisked on their way. I was floored by the seamless weaving of path and syncopation.

It was also really interesting to watch as de Keersmaker pushed her dancers to the point of exhaustion, even if only having them spin or make one repetitive movement (or in the men’s case, stand on one leg). In the moments of exhaustion, the wiggles, the almost-falls, the near misses of another person’s body added to the experience of these random-looking associations in mimicking the pattern that life seems to take.