Oona Doherty premieres a searching and existential ‘Navy Blue’
From the get-go, it’s clear why Northern Ireland choreographer Oona Doherty is becoming known as one of the most original and provocative voices of her generation. The audience for her company’s Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival debut are milling outside the Ted Shawn Theatre Thursday night when a Chevy sedan with a blacked-out window creeps down the pathway, horn blaring. It stops, and a body tumbles out of the trunk to lie sprawled on the ground. But wait — it’s OK. To a thumping bass beat, the young street tough portrayed by an extraordinary Sati Veyrunes arises in triumph, working the crowd with macho posturing and playfully confrontational lookat-me swagger. Until the car pulls away down the hill – and Veyrunes runs after, shouting “Wait! Wait!” with a trace of vulnerability and panic in her voice.
“Hope Hunt and the Ascension Into Lazarus” continues once we’re all finally in the theater. Veyrunes prowls the aisles, yelling at us to sit down so the show can start. Once onstage, she unspools a stunning array of disaffected, working class personalities that Doherty, who created the role for herself, says were inspired by “lads in the streets of Belfast.” Veyrunes, who has taken over the role in performances around the world, seems born to it. Exploring a darker emotional terrain, her uncanny transformations are marked by a raw, restless energy and committed visceral physicality through spins and falls, pop and lock isolations, and offcenter balances. She accompanies herself with repetitive vocalizations in a range of languages that brilliantly morphs into recognizable words and phrases. After an abrupt darkness, Veyrunes emerges all in white, bringing home the hunt for hope in a circle of light.
The program’s second half is the US premiere of Doherty’s largest, most ambitious work to date, “Navy Blue.” It’s fitting that Doherty’s cast of 12 dancers (who are uniformly fabulous) come from different countries around the world, as the hour-long work recalls global strife, social unrest, immigration, political oppression, and ultimately the search for meaning and perhaps redemption. The first section, set to the romantic strains of Rachmaninoff, seems like an unfolding series of potent little stories, with the group dynamic in constant flux. Sharp unisons of movement, ranging from balletic to pedestrian to something that seems totally fresh, often fracture into paranoid huddles and fearful crouches. Individual dancers break away and return. Occasionally, they coalesce into face-front lines in their dark blue uniforms, and they look straight into our eyes, as if to say, “You did this. You are doing this.” We are all culpable.
At the crack of isolated gun shots, one by one, dancers fall to the ground until they are all lying in puddles of glowing blue light. Now we change gears. Accompanied by a thrumming, throbbing electronic score by Jamie xx, the dancers arise as if from some primordial soup, though the taped text is more a rambling dystopian rumination of existential dread. “I’m a small insignificant thing,” Doherty intones. It’s a powerful, compelling text that sometimes overshadows the dancing, pondering life and death, greed, asking tough questions as the dancers explore collective and individual madness and resilience.
But in the end, the text morphs into a kind of prayer of acceptance, hope, and gratitude. The cast dwindles to only Zoé Lecorgne in a single spotlight, an astonishing agitated blur of rubbery limbs and quivering torso, like energy before it converts into mass. Gradually, the others enter to enfold her in a calming embrace. As they cluster together, they embody the section’s title, “submission into love,” and suggest that perhaps we might just have another chance to get this right.