Photo: Mia Alon
Two men stand off-center on a massive swath of stage. Dressed alike in blue-gray shirts and drab pants, they begin by hardly moving, accompanied by an ever-increasing drone of speakers suspended overhead.
They match, mimic, and mirror each other like shadows, brothers, friends, or two parts of one soul in an hour-long duet that progresses from separation to junction, from gentleness to violence, from grace to awkward stumbling, exploring the potential of simple movements like walking on knees.
Winter Variations, created and performed by Emanuel Gat and Roy Assaf, premiered yesterday at Duke's Reynolds Theater as part of the American Dance Festival. Set to music by Schibert (Die Krahe), Strauss (Four Last Songs), The Beatles' (A Day in the Life), and Riad al Sunbati (Awedt Eini ala Rouyack), the movement was often gestural and tactile - rooted in simplicity but woven with complexity. As the dancers walked on their knees in arcs around the stage they crossed in and out of the harshly lit areas on stage. Often they crawled into dark spots but were never totally obscured. As the lighting changed, or as they moved to different areas of the stage, their bodies changed too. Upstage in blinding illumination, their edges sharpened, moving like line-drawings in a brilliant rectangle that served as a counterpoint to the vast shadow that covered the upper area of stage. Only minutes earlier they had traded shirts in the cover of that near darkness.
Moving throughout light and shadow, space and time, music and silence, the two men anachronistically illustrate relationships: with self, other, and outside.