Deganit Shemy’s “2 kilos of sea” has moved from an outdoor church courtyard to indoors at BAC (photo by Julieta Cervantes)
Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space
450 West 37th St. between Ninth & Tenth Aves.
September 15-17, 7:30, $20
www.bacnyc.org
www.dganit-shemy.com
Last summer, Deganit Shemy presented the site-specific 2 kilos of sea in the John Street United Methodist Church courtyard as part of the LMCC’s annual Sitelines program. The New York-based Israeli choreographer, who grew up on a kibbutz, has now repurposed the forty-minute piece for the Howard Gilman Performance Space at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where it is being performed through Saturday. On a colorful stage that echoes a construction site, complete with plastic orange fence barricades, fake green grass, a yellow collapsible play tunnel / accordion air duct, and a tiny toy car, Denisa Musilova, Savina Theodorou, Michael Ingle, Rebecca Warner, and Elyssa Dole move about in a nonlinear, fragmented exploration of love, childhood, and morphing relationships. Warner is front and center, wearing a bright-red knee-length dress and a perpetual smile, obsessed with the play tunnel, approaching it with fear and trepidation, continually kicking it as if it were alive. As Jim Dawson’s thrilling sound design goes from carnivalesque to electronic music to ambient street noise, members of the company thump on the ground, leap up from behind a large photo backdrop of the church courtyard, balance atop a long concrete block, engage in snippets of folk dances, and shift the barricades, creating ever-changing physical and psychological boundaries. As in such previous works as Arena and Iodine, Shemy’s 2 kilos of sea is not so much about story as visceral movement and brute emotion, an evening of avant-garde experimental dance theater that plays with expectations even through the very end of the piece.