‘Long Run’ dances toward the unknown
The title of Tere O’Connor’s “Long Run” invokes the New York choreographer’s 38year run of making dance and the values of speed and endurance his company of eight are challenged to achieve. And so they did, on Thursday, Nov. 14, when this 2017 work had its West Coast premiere at ODC Theater.
Their arms in seeming perpetual motion — pinwheeling, arching overhead, fluttering or sending out semirobotic semaphores — the dancers swept through space in evershifting pairs, larger groups and solo jaunts. For 70 minutes, they traded moves and notions rapidly. One of them would try out some new way of swaying, hopping up and down or shouldering an imaginary burden, and soon another two or three or maybe all of them would catch on and try it for themselves.
They didn’t dress alike (motley costumes by Strauss BourqueLafrance) or touch a lot, which made it count more when they did, but the performers stayed in tight, hairtrigger communion with each other.
They swapped knowing looks. They watched each other keenly, either up close or from the fringes of the stage, and always knew where their comrades would be and what they’d be doing next. They were all in bare feet, united in direct contact with the floor.
Yet for all the velocity of bodies, shared ideas and O’Connor’s own fitful music pinging around the space, the slower moments, both the passages of walking and the abrupt, sometimes deliciously extended freezes, were essential if paradoxical punctuations of the whole. Even as the dancers and audience got a chance to pause and gather themselves, the uncertainty and tension built.
Stillness turned especially potent whenever the performers advanced directly toward the audience and sent searching, enigmatic gazes up the banked rows of viewers. It was hard not to feel implicated, even slightly guilty for witnessing such intimate goingson. The evening opened and ended, fittingly enough, with the faintest movements barely seen in dim light.
O’Connor worked in geometries, of both physical space and form. When he set his dancers in parallel or transverse motion, one group forward and the other back, counting steps in complex counterpoint, the performance took on a lucid, layered harmony.
At its best, the piece had the kind of rigor and supple variations of a Bach fugue. Lots of other associations came and went along the way, flickering in and out of view. There were whispers of court or ballroom dance, couples lining up in elegant pairs before shrugging it off. Marching bands, high school line dances, skydiving teams, raves and children’s games came to mind.
And weren’t those rapid hand signals they were flashing to each other like those a thirdbase coach conveys to the batter? Or were they inventing a new kind of sign language? “Long Run” was all these things and none of them, a stream of communal and individual enterprise.
Silas Riener tossed off a limber kathakaliscented solo, to a slightly Indian stretch of O’Connor’s recorded score. The compact and compelling Eleanor Hullihan embodied a severely afflicted woman, fighting and flailing desperately, her painfully torqued back to the audience, just to stand up. It was nothing less than heroic, a solitary feat of selfdetermination.
Engrossing as these and many other sections were, “Long Run” did begin to feel episodic, willed more than inevitable in spots, its inner logic and sense of order somewhat imposed and opaque. O’Connor has noted in interviews that the music, as is his custom, was not added until the choreography was complete. Make the connections, he seems to tell dancers and witnesses, as you will. The “Long Run” music toggled from delicate watery sounds to rhythmic pounding to becalmed keyboard riffs.
The piece invited a viewer’s own interpretive inventions without resolving or reaching any conclusions of its own. Look here. Now here. Notice the way this dancer’s shoulder dip or hand gesture matches or slightly varies that of the dancers nearby or across the room. Look there. Look everywhere. It didn’t always pay off. Not all the performances were equally strong; some dancers held focus more vividly than others, especially in the partnered sections.
Misgivings aside, “Long Run” summoned up an exploratory, even wonderstruck atmosphere, at once emphatic and elusive. It was in the dancers’ faces and in their bodies when something unforeseen would happen — an exhausted collapse of four couples to the floor, a simultaneous shiver of inspiration, a purposeful march forward and backward and ever onward, in tight formation, to destinations unknown.