THE HANGOVER REPORT – Miguel Gutierrez’s SUPER NOTHING explores our capacity for resilience (as well as our limitations)

A scene from Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing” at New York Live Arts (photo by Amelia Golden).

This past weekend, I also had the opportunity to attend Super Nothing by Miguel Gutierrez, an established downtown choreographer who is completing a two-year residency at New York Live Arts. Gutierrez’s latest creation is inarguably one of the headliner of this year’s Live Artery 2025, a multi-day event at the Chelsea dance venue that endeavors to connect dance-makers with curators and and presenters from around the world.

Super Nothing is one of the most dance/movement focused works I’ve seen to date from Gutierrez (whose works typically also considerably straddle theater and performance art vernacular). To realize his choreographic vision, he’s employed the unwavering commitment of a quartet of dancers — Jay Carlon, Justin Faircloth, Wendell Gray II and Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez — who morph into multiple roles over the course of the 70-minute work. In short, the piece is a deeply human yet clear-eyed investigation of our capacity for resilience — but also our limitations and vulnerabilities — in a world in which we have to endure an increasingly relentless onslaught of grief and trauma. Luckily, the piece is laced with as much compassion as it is with sadness and tribulations as it transpires under Gutierrez’s empathetic gaze, which extends to the audience in a sort of communal embrace.

Throughout, Gutierrez’s choreography is idiosyncratic and intentional, pregnant with familiar specificity despite its occasional triteness. Set to Rosana Cabán’s moody rhythmic soundscape, Super Nothing unfolds organically yet with the raw and unpredictable contours of life as lived. The final sequence is poignantly telling, depicting the notion that, invariably, we have been designed to keep going until we can’t. Bravely, we embark on the journey.

RECOMMENDED

SUPER NOTHING
Dance
New York Live Arts
1 hour, 10 minutes (without an intermission)
Through January 18

Categories: Dance

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