Cedar Lake goes inside and outside the brain in stunning ORBO NOVO
CEDAR LAKE CONTEMPORARY BALLET
Joyce Theater
175 Eighth Ave. at 19th St.
Through Sunday, October 25
Tickets: $10-$49
212-645-2904
http://www.joyce.org
http://www.cedarlakedance.com
In 1996, neuroanatomist Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor suffered a stroke from a hemorrhage in the left hemisphere of her brain. It took her eight years to fully recover, and she documented her struggle in the bestselling 2008 book MY STROKE OF INSIGHT: A BRAIN SCIENTIST’S PERSONAL JOURNEY. Her difficult battle — and the fight between the right and left sides of her brain — are vividly and creatively brought to life in Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s stunningly brilliant ORBO NOVO (THE NEW WORLD). The extraordinary seventy-five-minute piece, choreographed by Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui and performed by Cedar Lake’s strong, extremely talented cast of sixteen, examines the human brain in both words and image and is filled with both humor and fear. The show begins as a man and a woman reach out to each other from opposite sides of Alexander Dodge’s complex set, a series of movable interconnected lattice walls that alternately form cages, trapping the dancers, and trellises, up which they climb, or membranes, through with they pass. The company begins by reciting sections of Dr. Jill’s scientific yet playful text, spoken by a rotating series of men and women, individually and in tandem and dressed in contemporary clothing, the words themselves forming a thrilling dance as if moving with the performers’ bodies.
The thrills continue as a series of solos, duets, and trios display exciting dichotomies, evoking both inside and outside, right and left, motion and paralysis, and life and death, with memorable turns by Nickemil Concepcion, Soojin Choi, Jon Bond, Ana-Maria Lucaciu, and the always impressive Jason Kittelberger. From violently shaking their bodies to curling up in fetal positions to crawling up, down, around, and through the grid walls — part erector set, part flattened brain image — the dancers evoke both Dr. Jill’s heartbreak and struggle as well as her joyful recovery in an emotional and physical whirlwind. Meanwhile, behind an semi-opaque black scrim at the back of the stage, the Mosaic String Quartet and guest pianist Aaron Wunsch play Szymon Brzoska’s subtle, compelling score. ORBO NOVO is not just good — it’s mind-blowingly good, pun absolutely intended. Dance theater recently lost its brightest light, Pina Bausch, but has a rising star in Cherkaoui.
After getting a biopsy taken and drawing the death card while consulting a fortune-teller, popular French singer Cléo (Corinne Marchand) begins looking back at her life — and wondering just what’s left of it — while awaiting the dreaded results. The blonde beauty talks with old friends, asks her piano player (Michel Legrand, who composed the score) to write her a song, and meets a dapper gentleman in the park, becoming both participant and viewer in her own existence. As Cléo makes her way around town, director (and former photographer) Agnès Varda shows off early 1960s Paris, expertly winding her camera through the Rive Gauche. Just as Cléo seeks to find out what’s real (her actual name is Florence and that gorgeous hair is a wig), Varda shoots the film in a cinema verité style, almost as if it’s a documentary. She even sets the film in real time (adding chapter titles with a clock update), enhancing the audience’s connection with Cléo as she awaits her fate, but the movie runs only ninety minutes, adding mystery to what is to become of Cléo, as if she exists both on-screen and off, alongside the viewer. A central film in the French Nouvelle Vague and one of the first to be made by a woman, CLÉO DE 5 À 7 is an influential classic even as it has lost a step or two over the years. Varda, now in her eighties, has also made such well-regarded films as LE BONHEUR (1965), VAGABOND (1985), THE GLEANERS AND I (2000), and THE BEACHES OF AGNÉS (2008), among others. Big Dance Theater has reimagined the film in a multimedia production, COMME TOUJOURS HERE I STAND, that runs at the Kitchen through October 11.
