University Settlement, New York
June 15, 2024
Artistic Director: Faustine Lavie
Choreographer: Faustine Lavie with the dancers
Dancers: Beatriz Castro, Mayu Nayaka, Tsubasa Nishioka, Caleb Patterson, Sara Pizzi, Steven Orrego Upegui
New York City has a distinct pulse. As soon as you enter its bustling streets, you feel electricity, a current made up of many cultures and contradictions. New York is a city of promise and possibility- a symbol of the American dream. However, the arc of that dream is contingent on the people who have immigrated here, and on their stories.
For Faustine Lavie and her cast of six dancers, those stories are personal. In 2015, uncertain about the direction of her career as a professional dancer, Lavie left her home country of France to attend the Alvin Ailey School Certificate Program. Five years later she established Faustine Lavie Dance Project with the aim of creating work that emphasizes both the individuality and commonality of the human experience. Unspoken Voices, her latest evening length piece, focuses on immigrants who came to New York City to pursue a career in the performing arts. Her company dancers, natives of Columbia, Costa Rica, France, Italy and Japan, provide insights through original text and movement that detail their toils and hopes.
Performer Sara Pizzi walks slowly downstage in darkness as a recording of Lavie’s voice recounts her arrival in New York. Pizzi’s gestures reach and quickly recoil as she tentatively explores the space around her. She hinges to the floor and rolls across her back as her movements grow in size and boldness, executing complex shoulder rolls and balances that illustrate Lavie’s struggles with language and being understood. Five dancers sit along the perimeter of the stage, bearing witness. When they join Pizzi and a driving beat replaces Lavie’s narrative, she is caged by their crisp walking patterns, out of sync with their deliberate rhythm.
Linear pathways, reminiscent of ceaseless crowds traveling the city streets, emerge as a theme. Dancers meet and part in fleeting moments of support or longer entanglements, always returning to their individual paths. Performers mirror one another and join in short unison phrases, signifying the need to adapt yet emphasizing their individualism. The dancers rock together in a weighted pulse, another of Unspoken Voices simply stated yet powerfully recurrent themes, illustrating New York’s hypnotic vibration.
Each performer’s story, emotive rather than strictly narrative, adds a distinct layer to the tapestry that Unspoken Voices weaves, and the subtext is more powerful than the words being spoken. Ideas about the complexities of happiness and what really makes a home are the undercurrents of Lavie’s work, and concepts that every person can relate to. Prerecorded text provides the backdrop for each of the solo sections, and while the movement does not appear to have concrete relation to the words, they are crafted to evoke overarching states of mind. As dancers drag, lift, support and propel one another in duets and trios, feelings of freedom, daring and a search for connection emerge. Motions that suddenly arrest then release in spirals, taking dancers into and out of the floor, conjure feelings of surrender, but also apprehension and longing. Performer Caleb Patterson’s solo is of distinct note in this respect. A captivating mover, Patterson possesses a naturally dynamic movement style and an ability to catch and release his weight with surprising syncopation and suspension. As he speaks about feelings of shame and guilt, “becoming a low hum drifting in the landscape,” his movement quality vacillates between angst and ease in particularly pleasing ways.
A place is not just its buildings or structures. A place is its people. People shape cities as much as the cities they live in influence their lives and dreams. Lavie’s crafting reflects this truth. Whole group movement phrases serve as interludes between storytelling solos and duets. When dancers re-enter, they bring back the works thematic pulse, sweeping one another into the heart of the community with rhythmic walking, jogging, crawling, and chugging sequences. While some of the sections feel long, the evening as a whole does not. Rather it feels like a journey that audiences can both embark on and behold. In one particularly meaningful group section, the performers link hands as they stretch, pull and weave through one another, keeping their connection like a rope that ties them to their past while allowing them to reach safely into the unknown. As they melt into lifts and supports, the significance of each body within the group is evident, and their symbiotic relationship elicits images of construction, reminding us that finding one’s place within a group is essential for that structure’s integrity.
The dancers, all exceptional movers with distinct voices, captivate with nuance and emotional depth. As they excavate meaning from the stories of their lives, we too unearth our own stories, finding a common ground that engenders empathy and kinship. When they gather in a tight clump, shifting side to side in measured cadence and repeatedly gathering the space toward them with their arms, their message is clear: we have found our place and these are our stories. Stories that add to the ceaseless pulse that is New York.
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