Moving between epiphany, oblivion
“Give me an epiphany,” demands the protagonist early in “Betroffenheit” (2015), the often gripping Canadian dance theater epic that opened in Berkeley’s Zellerbach Hall Friday evening, March 10, to a disappointingly sparse audience. We all need an epiphany once in a while, but for this chap, the alternative is oblivion.
To make a full-evening, multimedia work on the subject is a chancy proposition, but this collaboration between Jonathon Young of the Electric Company Theatre (who wrote it) and Crystal Pite (who directed and choreographed it for her Kidd Pivot troupe) adds up to a remarkable fusion of talents. Dancers act, Young dances after a fashion, and the prerecorded text yields a fluency of word and gesture that our local practitioners should note.
“Betroffenheit” is a German expression translated as “extreme impact.” We learn in the first part of the 120-minute work that Young has suffered the loss of a daughter in a fire; in blaming himself, he has become addicted to some unmentioned sub-
What retains our interest is the sense of struggle. Young, for all his verbalizing, hasn’t quite yielded to despair.
stance, has been institutionalized and cannot kick the habit. He makes phone calls to himself (there are autobiographical elements here). Dancer Jermaine Spivey acts as his embattled conscience, until he metamorphoses into a ventriloquist’s dummy in the second half. What retains our interest is the sense of struggle. Young, for all his verbalizing, hasn’t quite yielded to despair.
Instead, he yearns to return to the stage, which he does as an emcee in a hideously hued suit and a fright wig. We get a unison tap number with the Kidd Pivot dancers in bowler hats. We get showgirls with pink headdresses. We thrill to a salsa episode. We even get a duet between Young and a scantily clad woman (Tiffany Tregarthen), all suggestive of returning normalcy. Regeneration is a cabaret, old chum.
“Betroffenheit” sags a bit in the first part; you can only take so much psychovaudeville at one sitting, and the metaphor wasn’t exactly original with Young and Pite. After intermission, the curtain rises on the second part, where dance supplants the word. Pite (whose work is, alas, scarcely known in the Bay Area) favors thrusting, balance-testing moves, which these five ballet-trained dancers, alone on a smoky stage, animate with special grace. They separate, but always return as a unit. They join hands, form a circle and seem to foreshadow Young’s climb back to wholeness.
The other dancers in Kidd Pivot are Bryan Arias, David Raymond and Cindy Salgado. They performed in Jay Gower Taylor’s grim asylum room with multiple doors, lit evocatively by Tom Visser. Composition and sound design credit is shared among Owen Belton, Alessandro Juliani and Meg Roe.
That score turns rapturously lyrical in the final scene, as Spivey launches a devastating serene solo. In context, you might even call it healing.