Tere O’Connor
★★
Jul. 10 & 11
Reynolds Industries Theater, Durham
Something is amiss when a choreographer’s theories prove more engaging than the work that embodies them. This was the case with Long Run, Tere O’Connor’s newest work, commissioned by the American Dance Festival.
Critics and audiences have long celebrated the specificity of the choreographer’s explorations. O’Connor breaks down the grammar and syntax of human movements, gestures, and poses into individual visual phonemes that immediately telegraph information about personality, mood, power dynamics, relationships, and sexuality. O’Connor then re-sequences these glyphs into prismatic, quicksilver patterns that elude direct translation, a portrait of a culture conveyed in what can seem like an endless cascade of jump cuts.
Long Run began this way. Two dancers ushered out two more, and then another quartet joined them at the end of a brief, mutating arm-and-hand semaphore pattern. The granularity of O’Connor’s work was evident as dancers’ index fingers filigreed the air. The unanticipated, angular interactions in their seemingly eternal walkabout were leavened by emotionless, sudden stops. Both recalled the uncanny precision—and the inscrutable insularity—of the android hosts in HBO’s Westworld.
But Long Run plateaued in an overlong second section, becoming stuck in an indulgent rut while exhausting the stunted permutations of pedestrian movement with little intrinsic interest. A deadening sameness replaced insight as dancers’ movements seemed as noodling as the sound score O’Connor composed for his own work.
Momentary catwalk moves, monster poses, and flashes of fabulousness punctuated the increasing tedium. Then a sequence came in which dancers lounged along the floor with their backs to us, gazing upon an empty stage. Though the stillness may have been intended as a palate cleanser, it also provided a welcome relief from the longueurs that had come before.
