Sparse meditations on popular medications
out quick, intricate passagework on their guitars, with rhythmic motifs that dart through the textures in sharp, assertive flashes. Meanwhile, Fletcher and fellow dancers Kelly Del Rosario and Kit McDaniel execute a tightly regimented array of rhythmic turns and angular poses.
Everything is buzzing along like a well-oiled machine, but something is amiss, and the eerie undercurrent of the action gives this movement its dramatic charge. At unpredictable junctures, the performers suddenly lose focus — the dancers gaze off to the side, or point outside the frame, and the music starts to blur and go off the rails. Things snap back into place — the drug is working its magic — but the victory is only temporary, and soon the performers wander off in a haze of distraction.
Even wittier and more on point is the final sardonic tribute to Viagra (which also represents the endpoint of the evening’s slow sartorial striptease from buttoned-up costumes, replete with neckties, to the spectacle of six performers in their underwear). Here Del Rosario fields the insistent physical demands of his two female colleagues, who throw themselves at him in increasingly fierce and heedless vaults; the muscular preening that the drug inspires finds a virtuosic counterpart in Del Rosario’s athletic performance.
In between these two vivid and fast-paced episodes, though, comes a series of slow, trippy and only marginally differentiable creations. Gervais’ spare, swirling guitar textures and Fletcher’s dreamlike choreography are meant to evoke, in turn, Ambien, Xanax, Prozac and Vicodin, and the effects are often enchanting.
But these chapters often seem like variations on a single theme — nodding off, falling out, losing one’s moorings. The occasional feedback-laden buzz of an electrical guitar comes as a welcome stimulant.