Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – Bobbi Jene Smith’s BROKEN THEATER: A fractured choreographic and meta-theatrical dissection of the theater-making process

• By drediman
• May 1, 2023
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This past weekend at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theatre, I also had the opportunity to catch one of the closing performances of Bobbi Jene Smith’s Broken Theater. Co-presented by La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in association with American Modern Opera Company (otherwise known as AMOC*), the devised piece is in essence a fractured dissection of the theater-making process.

In short, Broken Theater is dance theater in the purest sense of the word. In equal measure experimental theater and contemporary dance, the work exists in a liminal space that allows Smith – who also appears in the piece – to fully access movement, text, meta-theatrical trappings, and live music in her free-association musings. The show features aggressive, often poetic choreography, which seems to take its cue from a viscerally wrought, intensely human brand of dance theater made famous by Pina Bausch. Where the piece differentiates itself is the encompassing, immersive way it inhabits the Ellen Stewart Theater, utilizing the venue’s deepest shadowy recesses in its pursuit to lay bare the raw, trust-intensive process that is making theater. The resulting work is a restless, ghostly, and thematically layered fever dream that continues to haunt me as I pen this review.

Broken Theater has been staged by Smith in association with the choreographic contributions of her idiosyncratic company of 12 dancer-actors, each of whom perform the piece with the kind of fearless abandon and aggressive intensity that questions the boundary between performance and reality. The illusion is made all the more complete by the spectral lighting design by John Torres.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED

BROKEN THEATER
Dance theater
La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival in association with AMOC*
1 hour, 30 minutes (without an intermission)
Closed