Curtis gets audience into the dance
Late in the performance of “The Way You Look (at Me) Tonight,” the image of philosopher Alva Noë peers from a side wall telling us that perception is about opening yourself up and that to perceive is to fall in love. On the floor you find the two performers, Claire Cunningham and Jess Curtis, with their defenses finally down, finally finding the groove.
The opening Thursday, Sept. 29, at CounterPulse (a co-production with Yerba Buena Center for the Arts), marked the American premiere of the nearly new evening-long piece and brought back the Jess Curtis/Gravity team to San Francisco.
Curtis, to my knowledge, has not previously made a piece with such focused intent. Nor has he been so canny in making the audience complicit in his observations and ramblings about the subjectivity of perception. We were invited to abandon the hall’s bleachers and plunk ourselves on chairs in the midst of the performance space, advancing a feeling of intimacy rare even in postmodern dance.
Scots-born Cunningham is a disabled dancer for whom crutches are necessary for locomotion. Curtis tells us that an accident a while ago forced him to use crutches (“Here comes Daniel DayLewis,” he cracks, referring to the film “My Left Foot”), and that’s enough to send the pair off on a 100-minute, intermission-less dialogue on how we view the world and how the world views us.
The topics of their exchange range from what they call “perceptual fluctuation” to famed disabled performer Bill Shannon to the use of crutches. What is autobiographical and what is transformed fiction remains a mystery.
Yet Cunningham and Curtis create a wonderful emotional bond as they wind through the crowd, pausing for a push-up or a climb up a ladder. The couple explore each other’s bodies with a smoothness and a supportiveness rare in any form of dance.
Although it sometimes looks improvised, the piece consists of scores to which Curtis alludes. Intermittently, a timekeeper yells, “Five minutes!” Curtis, as always, seems to confide in an audience, and Cunningham’s Scots burr is endearing. The conversation sometimes opens doors a crack and no further. Cunningham tells us that being crippled in the eyes of the world spurred her interest in LGBT issues, and you want to know more.
“The Way You Look (at Me) Tonight” is first-rate in the production department. Michiel Keuper’s hanging colored rings festoon the space. Yoann Trellu’s projections are provocative. The music, all by Matthias Herrmann, except for the Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song that gives the piece its title, is appropriately moody.
Still, the work seemed overlong; there are a few moments when it seems to stop in its tracks. I think it’s a mistake to make us sit in our seats while Noë on film reads a chunk of his book while the text is projected. The episode suggests a didacticism at odds with the affable performers.