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Icarus

nytheatre.com review by Loren Noveck
August 15, 2005

The familiar Greek myth of Icarus is interpreted in a lyrical rather than a literal way in this dance performance. Director Nina Hein has assembled six short dance pieces (by three young choreographers, Elyssa Dole, Jonette Ford, and Jeffrey Freeze, all of whom also perform), some accompanied by video, and one stand-alone segment of video (which I found less effective than the dances).The pieces are strikingly different, but each is inspired by themes and images from the Icarus story—reaching for glory, flying, breaking away from a parent, falling, drowning. Some are languid and dreamlike, others full of sharp angles and brusque movements. The video brings in images of dripping, flowing, and swirling liquid—sometimes it seems like rain on a window, sometimes oil or melting wax, sometimes startlingly like blood.Icarus reminded me of the ability of dance to bypass the conscious mechanisms by which we tell stories, and sink images deep into the subconscious. I couldn’t quite tell you what any of these dances means, or precisely how they are connected to the Icarus myth, but I understood the themes and connections between them and the story nonetheless.Two of the pieces made a particular impression. The first, Blue, is the opening segment of the evening, choreographed by Jonette Ford and performed by Ford, Patty Arrieta, and Johari Mayfield. It is performed to a piece of music called "Ocean Grayness" (all the music is by Katharina Rosenberger), and the dance itself has a languid quality that calls to mind the smooth never-quite-stillness of the ocean on a cloudy day. What is most striking about it is the way it evokes flying. The dancers spend most of the piece curled on the ground, extending legs or arms slowly and at slightly askew angles. It feels like they’re testing parts of their bodies that have never been used before, tentatively spreading wings for the first time—but not quite secure enough to leap into the air quite yet.The other piece I found particularly fascinating was White, choreographed and performed by Jonette Ford and Elyssa Dole. The piece is a duet for performers who are bound together by long tubes of fabric connecting their hands and feet. This creates an amazing sense of tension; each dancer is forced to consider the sheer mass or weight of the other at every moment. The piece opens with one dancer literally dragging the other behind her, trying to move freely but anchored by the still form that she is forced to pull onstage. For me, this piece evoked themes from the Icarus story in a remarkably evocative way: the beauty and the frustration in the bonds between parent and child; striving to break free and soar but never being quite able to leave the ground—or the father—behind.The evening’s final piece, Yellow, interweaves movement themes from all the dances, using the full company to create a impressionistic path through the full story of Icarus’s flight and fall to earth.