There was more than one moment in LEIMAY’s borders that had me literally hold my breath, but I will remember one more than others: an incredible sequence about an hour into the work, when six dancers get suspended for almost ten minutes in a most unnatural, concocted position you can possibly imagine, a compressed shoulder stand that reduces them to perfectly symmetrical, abstract shapes that get to unravel as the scene progresses. I held my breath because it seemed like the slightest external interference could tip these tense figures into oblivion, destroy the delicate balance existing on the verge of impossibility.
It was like watching a moon landing. Or a birth. Something of huge importance and great fragility. It seemed like a moment of great transformation, a border right between ‘before’ and ‘after’ that will never look even remotely alike.
I always admired the great skill of working with light that was a building block of at least two LEIMAY works I have seen before, but in borders, there is a special, three-dimensional quality to the lighting that defines special relations, shapes, and colors beyond what things look like. There is something highly sculptural in it. The most immaterial of all things seems to have its weight and density, and power to influence physical objects in its path. It literally builds something out of nothing, suggesting shapes and textures. It feels tactile. It feels no less material and real than dancers’ beautiful, athletic and sexless bodies.
The sound accompanying this scene is as minimal as the set in this minimalist, almost austere production. Squeaks and scratches barely recognizable as sounds grow into more discernible, aural tones as the shrunk bodies unveil like plants growing from strange seeds. This is the moment in the work when those shapes finally become bodies – or, for lack of better expression, become recognizable as such. Up till now, they were for most of the time almost nonfigurative: dark, sculpture-like silhouettes cut out of darkness and fog by intense, sharp, unrelenting white spotlight; or impressionistic blobs, liquefied by pale-blue light into human watercolor paintings; or abstract collections of stripes, or slices, carved from thin air and held together by darkness. Now they reveal themselves as humans – although watching them move puts their assumed humanity into question in a mind of anyone who understands psychical limitation of a human bodily form.
I have seen a lot of good performers in dance, but what LEIMAY crew has shown tonight will significantly change my expectations from a live movement-based work. Borders is one of the most trying pieces of dance I can think of. For its running time of eighty minutes, it leaves no space for rest, no single moment when a tired muscle can be unnoticed. There is no escape from being constantly exposed, watched, and naked. How are people even able to do one sequence of that, much less the entire work? What a gorgeous ordeal are they going through; how on earth are they able to deliver? Mind you, there is so much more than craft in this performance. The dancers contributed to the overall choreography, and one can clearly see when individual imagination and awareness add personal touches, custom-made for each – very different – physicality.
I love works that make me think of dance both as a very sensual, bodily activity deeply connected to our external shells – but also as a language, existing on the very border (that word again!) of what can be verbalized and what cannot. There is a lot of talking in the piece from the beginning, starting with the intense sequence where what we’re hearing strongly suggests a half-faded transmission in an unknown language (I thought it was Japanese until Shige told me it was completely made up.) There are moments when the verbal and the physical converge, like later in the work, when word-like sounds articulated by the dancers seem to be propelling them from one position into another. And as in every piece that makes the best of the strange dichotomy of dance as a language and as a movement in time, there is no single answer to the question: what is this work about? The eponymous borders are always there, palpable yet fluid, inescapable but possible to circumvent – and as the piece winds down to the same darkness it emerged from, there is a feeling, a goosebumps-inducing flash of understanding. Don’t ask me to put it in words, but I could swear I touched it.
borders by LEIMAY
Performance Direction, Visual Design, and Concept: Shige Moriya & Ximena Garnica
Performed by Masanori Asahara, Andrea Jones, Derek DiMartini, Lindsey Mandolini, Jeff Shortt, Emily Smith
At BAM Fisher, opens tomorrow (Feb 18th) thru 22nd. Go.
Photos by Pavel Antonov
