Interludes

THE HANGOVER REPORT – The freshly-minted GIBNEY COMPANY debuts in an ambitious, richly pertinent bill, with an emphasis on dance theater

• By drediman
• November 4, 2021
• No Comments

This week, the freshly-minted Gibney Company is making a big splash right out of the gate. The brainchild of Gina Gibney, whose multi-faceted Gibney Dance has been a pronounced presence in the New York dance scene for three decades now, the new endeavor was unveiled at The Joyce Theater on Tuesday in an ambitious, richly pertinent bill featuring three world premieres by Alan Lucien Øyen, Sonya Tayeh, and Rena Butler (the debut program continues until Sunday). With a focus on dance theater, the company is comprised of 12 idiosyncratic dancers – or “artistic associates” – and shaped in the familiar Euro-chic mold of Nederlands Dans Theater. Thankfully, Gibney Company differentiates itself through the impressive fluency of its dancing, as well as its uniquely collaborative process.

The evening is bookended by the program’s meatier offerings. Things got off to an intriguing start with Mr. Øyen’s The Game Is Rigged, a lengthy piece (with a duration of more than 40 minutes) that’s performed by the entire company. In many ways, the work is the epitome of dance theater, integrating design, movement (fluid and coiled), music (by Nils Frahm) and spoken word (provided by the dancers themselves during the performance) to achieve its intended dramatic effect. There’s a lot to unpack and chew on in the stylized piece, which strives to capture the unvarnished, confounding essence of living, particularly as it relates to the futility of human interactions in these anxiety-ridden times. Mr. Øyen, a multi-disciplinary theater artist from Norway who is making his New York debut with this work, depicts all this in a cascade of fleeting scenes of intimate but frayed physical interactions, most of which are half-baked and intentionally don’t amount to much. Ultimately, it’s a grim worldview dominated by loneliness and self-sabotaging tendencies.

On the other side of the evening sits Ms. Tayeh’s Oh Courage!, which seems a direct response to the jabbing anxieties of Mr. Øyen’s piece. Set to the fabulously emotive music of the Bengsons (a beguiling husband-and-wife duo whom I’ve been following for quite a number of years now) – who perform live onstage alongside the the Gibney Company dancers – the work is a rousing rallying cry for collective resilience in the face of adversity. Ms. Tayeh, who recently deservedly won a Tony Award for her choreography for Moulin Rouge!, is a talented dance-maker with a keen sense of the dynamic relationship between music and movement. In appropriate contrast to The Game Is Rigged, whose choreography is largely disjointed and isolating, she strikes back with a stubbornly synchronized piece that insists on the power of courage as a consciously communal act. Although a part of me couldn’t shake the feeling that I was watching some variation on a music video, there’s an organic quality to it all that shelters Oh Courage! from the mundane.

Tucked between these two bookends is Lusus Naturae, a relatively short but thought-provoking work by Ms. Butler, who is a Gibney dancer (throughout the evening, my eyes were consistently drawn to this majestic mover), as well as the company’s choreographic associate. In its clever depiction of reverse-colonization – by way of the problematic narrative of the film King Kong – the timely piece for three dancers is a fascinating exercise in the reclamation of power and identity via the very agents and iconographies that oppress and dehumanize.

RECOMMENDED

GIBNEY COMPANY
Dance
The Joyce Theater
Approximately 2 hours (including an intermission)
Through November 7