“the fisherman, the butterfly, eve & her lover” at CorningWorks

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A challenge of conceiving the climate change crisis is that, unlike other events and problems, we can’t directly see or feel it, because there is no position from which to view it in its totality. To borrow from philosopher Timothy Morton, climate change is a “hyperobject,” something that is “massively distributed in time and space relative to humans”; that is, it’s happening all around us, all the time, at a pace and scale that defies direct perception. We can experience its effects – stronger storms, hotter heat waves, shrinking glaciers, etc. – but we can’t see or feel climate change, we can only see and perceive it through its effects (and, of course, there are many – too many – who would deny that what we see and perceive is an effect of climate change, but let’s not go there).

In her new eco-parable the fisherman, the butterfly, eve & her lover choreographer Beth Corning has come up with a resonant visual metaphor that niftily demonstrates how a thing can be real, and have effects, even when we can’t see it. At the top of the performance, a small wooden boat with a tiny figure sitting in it rests in the upstage left corner of the playing space. Over the course of the hour-plus performance, the boat moves imperceptibly across the stage, so slowly that even if you watch it carefully (as I did, several times, once I became aware that it had shifted position) you can’t see it move. And yet, move it does, winding up on the opposite end of the stage. Just as with climate change, the cause is imperceptible, but the effect is evident.

Nathan Keepers. Photo by Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks

You’ll note that I wrote in that last paragraph “once I became aware that it had shifted position” – the metaphor, along with the production as a whole, also captures something about how we’re collectively putting our heads in the sand when it comes to dealing with climate change. Stage left is a platform covered with Amazon boxes where Eve (Jillian Hollis) and her lover (Evan Fisk) live in green overabundance, eagerly and excitedly opening packages so that they can repeatedly try on new things. Surrounded by more than they could ever use, they are distracted by consumption, and we, in turn, are distracted by them – by their romantic, lush movements – and fail to notice that the little boat is on the move. Stage right is the sparse home of the lonely Fisherman (Nathan Keepers), who has nothing but his stories and a tiny pet fish to keep him company. He lives in a world in which sand has taken the place of water; in one of the piece’s most poignant moments, he gives the bulk of a found bottle of water to keep his little fish alive. In the middle is a large sand-covered space where the Fisherman “fishes” and the lovers cavort; it’s also where the Butterfly (Beth Corning) flits and floats, bewildered by the changed state of the world. Is she the apocryphal butterfly whose flap of a wing can change the weather half a world away, or merely another species struggling to survive in a waterless environment? She, too, seems eager to find a way to deny what’s right in front of her eyes, planting a bed of fake flowers in a block of Styrofoam to create a spring garden.

As the boat moves from the lovers’ “paradise” of overconsumption to the ascetic isolation of the fisherman’s world, it also connects the dots: the one (overconsumption, heedless distraction) leads to the other (ecological devastation). It’s a grim parable, and one that we ignore at our peril.

“Happily Ever After” by CorningWorks (at The SPACE Upstairs)

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If you are familiar with Beth Corning’s sensibility, then you probably don’t need to be told that the title to this piece is ironic; irony is, after all, her stock in trade. The subject of Happily Ever After is the nightmare inside the fairytale of heteronormative romance – namely, the gender roles and expectations that shore up and enable cycles of domestic violence. The dynamic of abuse, and the way that cultural definitions of gender and gender roles help establish the psychological patterns of both abusers and victims, is investigated here through roughly a dozen evocative dance vignettes.

Dress installation by Beth Corning and Cindi Kubu. Photo Wendy Arons

The piece is prefaced by an invitation to explore and “listen to” a group of Victorian bridal gowns hanging on the far end of the playing space. The dresses are exquisite symbols of an old-fashioned vision of feminine beauty and frailty and poise, and they carry the fairytale promise of matrimonial bliss in their lace and satin and tuile and silk. Yet each dress has a dark story to tell, and you have to get very close to each individual one in order to distinguish its voice from the rest. The intimacy engendered is important: the accounts you hear are of women at their most vulnerable and frightened, of women who survived abuse and for whom the dream embodied by the dress became a nightmare from which they barely escaped with their lives. 

The performance then opens with a scene that chillingly translates those stories into an embodied metaphor: Corning, sitting on a ladder among the dresses, “sews” her own fingers together, treating her own body like an object and dispassionately immobilizing and trapping her hand in much the same way that both the women’s voices are trapped in the dresses, and the women themselves were trapped in their marriages. 

More metaphor and variation on the theme follow: in the second number, dancers Jillian Hollis, Catherine Meredith, and Endalyn Taylor Outlaw each dance a duet with a white shirt that stands in for the complexities of a woman’s relationship to an abuser. As they interact with it, the shirt becomes, in turn (and among other things you may find in it): a seducer, a bandage, a baby, an embrace, a threat, a comfort, a strangler, a binding, and the simple object of the domestic labor of laundry.

Dionysios Tsaftaridis. Photo Frank Walsh, courtesy corningworks.

The third piece brings in dancer Dionysios Tsaftaridis, whose presence allows the choreography to explore the double-sided coin of passion and violence that often characterizes abusive relationships. Dressed in a tie and suit, he also represents a modern-day version of the fairy tale prince who, shaped by toxic notions of masculinity, needs women to be victims in order to take his place in the story as a rescuer. This dance drives home the cyclical nature of abuse and victimization; in a later solo, Tsaftaridis masterfully layers complexity into the portrait of the abuser, revealing him as both dangerously in thrall to and tormented by his power to inflict pain.

The subsequent dances vary in energy and dynamism, some athletic and expansive, others soulful and introspective. All find ways of expressing multiple aspects of the physical and psychical damage women endure, in relationships that are both recognizably abusive and in those that “merely” replicate everyday patriarchal norms. In one of my favorite pieces of the evening, Hollis, Meredith, and Outlaw don bright red dresses and, along with Tsaftaridis, engage in a sort of stylized ballroom dance – set to baroque harpsichord music – that gradually devolves into barely contained enmity and discord. The body language and facial expressions on the dancers pitch-perfectly convey the way violence and resentments seethe below the surface of relationships, and the dance as a whole shows how much harm might be hidden by the social pressure to keep up appearances in polite society. 

At a little over an hour, the performance is fairly short, but Corning manages to cover a poignant range of experience and perspective in a tight frame. The dance movements are punctuated by segments of fairytales that remind us of the tropes that govern so much of our imagining of heteronormative “romance” (and do so much damage to the psyches of both girls and boys). A brief silent segment in which the dancers draw images of domesticity on the back wall also produces one of the most heartbreaking laughs of the evening, when Outlaw, after adding a “Stop” sign to her picture of a suburban street, begins to exit and then suddenly runs back and adds the word “Please.” That funny-not funny “please” says everything you need to know about internalized oppression.

As always, Corning also brings a beautiful and eclectic range of music to her choreography, often juxtaposing music, text, and dance to produce unexpected associations. A notable example comes when Hollis entangles and disentangles herself in an enormous bridal veil against a sonic landscape consisting of the Spanish guitar piece “Recuerdos de la Alhambra” underneath a woman’s voice offering a nervous, rapid-fire account of psychological abuse: the soothing nature of the guitar becomes a musical manifestation of gaslighting, threatening to erase the reality of what we are seeing and hearing. 

The evening ends with another such juxtaposition – a moment of potential comedy that is immediately undercut with sober statistics about domestic violence. A scene that starts out with a vibe of playful competition ends with a stage full of broken, maimed bodies that the dancers fruitlessly seek to somehow make whole: there is no happily ever after to this story, just a nightmare of shattered lives.  

“the other shoe” by CorningWorks at the New Hazlett Theater

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If you can take a work of art as an indicator of its creators’ state of mind, then it’s clear from the other shoe that Beth Corning and her collaborator Kay Cummings are frustrated, angry, and perhaps more than a little bit bitter. The source of their frustration? In part it’s the usual suspects that haunt nearly all women who have survived more than a couple of decades into adulthood – that is, if I must name them, patriarchal power and misogyny – but, even more, it seems to be the tenor of cultural conversations, particularly among those who occupy the ideological left. “I don’t feel like dialogue because it’s too hard to get people to think differently, they’re all just yelling at each other,” Cummings complains early in the show. “Not many of us are really interested in listening. We just want a bubble that agrees with us.”

Beth Corning, The Other Shoe. Photo by Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks.

The “other shoe” of the show’s title may refer to that other side of the conversation no one is listening to; or, in a sideways sort of way, it may refer to the lack of “if-the-shoe-were-on-the-other-foot” empathy that such a refusal to listen implies. It may also refer to the cloud of anxiety and apprehension we’ve all been living under, which is literalized by scenic designer Stephanie Mayer Staley with a cloud of white shoes hovering like a flock of birds above the stage. 

Corning and Cummings perform in black and white costumes on a black and white stage, a clear nod to their perception that there seems to be no grey middle for compromise and dialogue (costumes by artist Kristin McLain). A prime target of their frustration seems to stem from finding themselves, as white women, labeled “privileged” despite being lifelong victims of harassment, discrimination, and oppression. This is, of course, dangerous water to wade into, and they know it: the directors note states simply: “If by chance you don’t agree with what is being presented…well that’s the point.”

Corning invited choreographers Donald Byrd, Martha Clarke, Li Chiao-Ping, and Max Stone to stage solo dances in addition to the pieces she created; the result is a series of disconnected vignettes (mostly danced by Corning) interspersed with spoken text and song (mostly delivered by Cummings). What seems to unite the dances with each other, and the text, is an overall mood of dispiritedness and despair. The final image offers a glimmer of hope in its serene acceptance of the inevitability of change, but the show’s ending also reminds us that we never know when that other shoe will drop. 

“The World As We Know It (by 6 women of a certain age” at CorningWorks

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What do women “of a certain age” have to tell us about the world?

A great deal, it turns out, although – when told through the medium of dance, as in the CorningWorks dance assemblage The World As We Know It – obliquely and with circumspection. These women aren’t giving their hard-earned knowledge of the world away.

The piece consists of six solo dance performances knitted together by interludes featuring the entire ensemble. Less overtly thematic and narrative than much of Corning’s previous work, the pieces, taken both individually and collectively, nonetheless explore familiar territory for her: gender roles and expectations, social pressures on women, and women’s lack of access to social and economic power. The ironic costuming underscores the evening’s political edge: when the “tribe” of women come together in the interludes, they are dressed in oversized pastel-colored men’s suits that make them look like children playing dressup; but as the interludes build to a final tableau around a “boardroom table,” it becomes clear that in reality the suits are nothing but an empty signifier of patriarchal power, a silly marker of status.

Beth Corning; Photo by Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks.

Each solo dance is expressive in a different way of women’s embodied desire, yearning, and pain, building on a shared  movement vocabulary to capture and convey the weight of lived female experience. Five of the six dancers are “of a certain age,” and they seem to move from a place deep in muscle memory; what they know of the world is communicated more through small, subtle, and secret gestures than through flamboyant athleticism.

Yet there is also plenty of agility and dexterity woven into each solo. The show opens with “In medias res,” Li Chiao-Ping’s acrobatic pas de deux with a table, which is set to text constellated around the syllable “be.” In the second solo, Mauriah Kraker’s “the quiet,” dancer Simone Ferro seems to shed her skin like a frantic butterfly emerging from a chrysalis. Women’s domestic matters find exploration in the next three solos: Endalyn Taylor pulls forward moments of physical and emotional crisis in “Is All,” a piece choreographed by Sarah Hook that I took to be a meditation on postpartum existential despair; Charlotte Adams emerges nude from a bathtub in “Imagining Ketchikan (Canciones del Corazon),” rendering visible the joy and pleasure that a mature body continues to be able to both produce and feel; and Beth Corning reprises, from her 2016 piece Remains, a scene around a dinner table that evokes the generations of family whose endearing habits and irritating idiosyncrasies have been lost to time. The final solo, Heidi Latsky’s “Unfinished,” is danced with brio by Jillian Hollis; a redhead like Corning, Hollis seems to stand in both for Corning’s younger self and for the future of the dance form, a future that will carry forward, in bodies at all stages of life, the insights and wisdom earned by artists like Adams, Chiao-Ping, Corning, Ferro, and Taylor.

“The Waiting Room” at CorningWorks

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There’s a sequence near the end of Beth Corning’s new dance piece The Waiting Room that struck a deep nerve with me. Performer Jacob Goodman begins to spin a simple pine coffin around a circle, like the hand of a clock, spinning it faster and faster as other dancers rush in, bearing the kinds of mundane objects that consume our days – a bowl of soup, a newspaper, an outfit – and scrambling to keep up with the spinning coffin. In the background, a fire begins to glow on the three projected screens, the dancer’s movements become more and more desperate, the rhythmic string music becomes more and more urgent, the coffin, and time, relentlessly spin on, the projections morph into an all-consuming forest fire, and suddenly the group of dancers stops, gestures, and disbands, leaving Goodman alone with the coffin once again.

Why did that sequence strike a nerve? Maybe it’s because, well, right now I’m sitting at my computer, staring at a screen, trying to convey my experience of the piece, and simultaneously struggling with the question of whether or not doing this is a valuable way to spend the precious minutes allotted to me. Am I simply allowing my time to be eaten up by life’s tasks – the meals prepared, the websites clicked on, the emails dealt with, the blog posts posted – while that coffin-clock hand spins down the hours to my certain death?

Such are the existential questions provoked by The Waiting Room. Goodman plays a Shomer, the man tasked, in the Jewish tradition, with guarding a dead body overnight before its burial. Actually, he’s a last-minute substitute for the regular Shomer, and because he’s been called in unexpectedly, he’s not fully prepared for the job. He’s forgotten his prayer book, so instead of reciting prayers, he begins to conjure – memories, stories, vignettes, dreams, fears, and images. A childhood story of watching a woman in a neighboring apartment undress. A memory of his mother’s cooking. Dreams of swimming.

Jacob Goodman in “The Waiting Room.” Photo Frank Walsh, courtesy CorningWorks

Structured as it is around the stories the Shomer tells his dead companion to fill the hours of vigil, this dance theater piece is more narrative than most of Corning’s work, but like most of her work it also slides easily between the concreteness of language and the fuzzy indecisiveness of image and metaphor. Vignettes from the Shomer’s childhood morph from the mundane to the sublime, as if being co-present with death has made him – and us – more alert to the dimensions of being alive – pushing back against the truism, projected at one point on the screen, that “we live as if we don’t know about the certainty of death.” Iain Court’s lighting design gives the dance sequences that alternate with the narrative a quality of otherworldliness, making the “waiting room” a liminal space between life and death, where things that are actually present and things that are present only in imagination or memory collide, interact, share space, and activate each other.

Goodman brings a winning ease to the role of the Shomer, both as an actor and dancer, and his familiarity with Jewish tradition allows him to downplay what might seem odd about the tradition to those unfamiliar with it and to call attention, instead, to the way in which being co-present with the dead becomes an opportunity to connect with the divine and reflect on our own mortality. Catherine Meredith is mysterious and languid as the neighbor whose undressing fascinated the Shomer in his childhood, and Beth Corning brings humor tinged with melancholy to her portrayal of the Jewish mother, always with an offer of (too much) food. Corning’s always-illuminating and captivating choice of music is enhanced, in this production, by the addition of the voice and presence of John Carson, who plays the imagined deceased “Phil” (at least, that’s what I took him to be) and sings, toward the end of the performance, a haunting Irish melody. Stephanie Meyer-Staley’s scenic design looks deceptively simple, but eloquent touches – like the stones that weigh down the scroll-like screens, which evoke the Jewish tradition of placing pebbles on gravestones – add unexpected depth and poignancy to the visual field. Projections by Jakob Marsico and Jessica Medenbach add an additional layer of lyricism and out-of-this-worldness to the performance, interlayering text, drawn imagery, and video with the live performance.

“six a breast” at CorningWorks

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In one of the vignettes in Corning Works’ new dance theater piece six a breast, dancer Sally Rousse twists and contorts her arms and legs on and around a trapeze-like swing hanging low to the ground. “Sorry!” she occasionally blurts out, in a vaguely familiar, business-like tone. Twist, contort, swing, “Sorry!” What is it that is so familiar about this scenario? And then, with her last “Sorry!”, the penny drops: she mashes the clear plexiglass seat of the swing against her breast, and the connection between her tortured contortions and the awkward discomfort of the annual mammogram (in which, my dear young and/or non-female readers, the boobies get squeezed between two plexiglass plates, often accompanied by brisk, unconvincing apologies from the tech whose job it is to make that squeeze as tight as possible) pings into place.

Leave it to dancer/choreographer Beth Corning to find such an off-kilter way to capture the indignities not just of a medical diagnostic ritual, but also a host of other (mostly mundane) tortures and torments women find themselves subject to. Makeup, domestic chores, body and skin care routines, and social expectations that women be nice, nurturing, and perpetually sublimate their rage – all these and more are grist for Corning’s dance mill, which takes the absurd and turns it into a series of sublime meditations on gender roles.

In addition to the exquisitely elegant Rousse, Corning is also joined on stage by collaborator Laurie Van Wieren. The three performers bring personality and idiosyncracy to the piece, like a female set of Marx Brothers or Stooges. Corning is the smart-ass clown; Van Wieren plays the befuddled, clumsy member of the trio; while Rousse is the dignified “straight man.” Some Corning performances are more theater than dance; not this one. Rousse’s virtuosity in ballet is on full display, and in places – particularly, in a vignette that might be subtitled “spinning her wheels,” – the beauty of her line and posture is breathtaking.

The evening is structured as a series of skits or circus acts, some solo, and some featuring two or three performers. Each skit captures facets of the female experience with wit and irony, sometimes in ways it’s difficult to put your finger on. For example, in one, Rousse traverses the stage with a basket full of eggshells; she tosses them on the floor in front of her and walks tiptoe on them. The metaphor here is clearly “walking on eggshells,” yet her mood is not one of anxiety, but pleasure, and when Corning – cleaning up behind her – steps on one of the shells herself, there’s a sense of wicked pleasure in the act. The image conveys something complicated about our relationship to these absurdities – perhaps that we’re so comfortable with what’s expected of us that we begin to fail to see how absurd the situation is.

Cleaning is a running theme throughout the performance – Corning materializes a wad of paper towels out of tiny purse to mop up spilled water in one of the early skits, and then later, in a perceptive commentary on the way women are socialized to be near-constantly vigilant about the cleanliness of their space, Van Wieren picks up a bit of schmutz from the floor mid-dance. (I’m willing to bet there wasn’t a woman in the audience who didn’t nod in recognition at both of these gestures; I’m certainly guilty as charged). Another running gag takes up the mystery of how to properly fold a fitted sheet (hint: it requires either magic, or seduction). The tension between our “domestic” and our “non-domesticated” selves is also a repeated theme, captured perhaps most vividly in a dance in which Corning’s body seems split between a barefooted “madonna” and a high-heeled “whore,” weighed down by jangling pots, pans, and babies beneath a transparent hooped skirt.

The costumes, designed by Corning and Lindsey Peck Scherloum, are stunning – all white, mostly transparent, and endlessly inventive in shape and texture. The monochrome white of the costumes beautifully supports the sublime-ridiculous mood of the danced vignettes. But with the final vignette – a presentation of Beckett’s one-act play Come and Go – we suddenly get color, as the performers come on in long coats of mustard, deep purple, and bright red, with elaborate matching hats covering all but their mouths. The visual image Corning achieves with the costuming of this final piece is striking; but even more remarkable is Corning’s simple but powerful staging. She has an intuitive understanding of how to fill out the pauses in Beckett’s work, and the result is a wry take on the way women use gossip and information to jostle for power among their frenemies. The final image of the night – of three women joined in the knowledge of having betrayed each other – feels like an apt, if bittersweet, coda to the evening’s reflections on the female experience.

“What’s Missing” at CorningWorks

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I probably failed to fully comprehend what Corning Works’ new dance work, What’s Missing, is about.

But that’s okay, because – as a disembodied voice repeatedly reminds us, in what is simultaneously a conjuration and conjugation of absence – what you see is imperfect, what they do is imperfect, we are flawed, we will fail to see, we are all wrong, and this performance will fail to resolve.

L to R: Beth Corning & Donald Byrd

What’s Missing may, in fact, be the most clear-eyed, and most despairing, artistic response to last year’s election that I’ve seen to date. How do you make meaning in a world of alternative facts and near constant disinformation? Co-choreographers and performers Donald Byrd and Beth Corning’s answer is a kind of resigned anxiety, expressed in hands coming to frantic, fluttering life on their own, in dance sequences that hesitate, stutter, and shrug, and in the fragmentation of the audience’s perception.

The piece is a series of solos and duets structured by the repetition of a thematic movement sequence in which the two performers come together on a white bench, join hands, connect, disconnect, spoon on the floor, and break apart. Each time this sequence is presented, the bench is placed in a different place on the all-white stage, which means that audience members sitting on three sides of the space have a different perspective on the movement each time (and also have a different view than others in the audience). Ushers encourage you to split apart from the person you’ve attended the performance with, the better to be able to compare perspectives after the show. Both of these are ideas that work better in theory than in practice: it wasn’t hard to extrapolate what the movement looked like from another person’s point of view, and if there were small differences in detail from repetition to repetition, my suspicion is that it would have been difficult for most spectators to recall and compare them with their companions in any case. Nonetheless, the bigger question the staging choice begs – the question of how it is that we can all be looking at the same thing and yet seeing it in very different ways – is clearly a politically urgent one, and Corning’s interest in finding a dance metaphor to pose it is a laudable one.

What’s perhaps most striking about this piece, however, is its decision to confront the world of alternative facts with what feels like an anti-response. “This performance will not change anything,” the voice says, robbing art of one of its presumed functions. In its exploration of the contours of the rabbit hole down which we have collectively tumbled, What’s Missing seems to propose that we are in a moment in which art must retreat from meaning in order to make sense of the world.

“Remains” (CorningWorks)

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Beth Corning’s Remains is short – barely an hour long – but the themes it explores are oversized, and linger. The one-woman dance piece is an elegaic homage to the people in her life who have gone – and, by empathetic extension, to those we’ve lost in our own lives.

Beth Corning. Photo Frank Walsh.

Britton Mauk’s scenic design looks a lot like my attic: a wall of cardboard boxes forming an upstage backdrop, their contents seemingly strewn all around the audience space. Christmas lights, books, shirts, pillows, bric-a brac: all those things that get collected in a life, treasures stored, only to become the junk we have to deal with when the original owner is gone. Anyone who’s had to clean out the family home after grandparents or parents have aged out or passed away will recognize the sinking feeling of nostalgia, regret, and emptiness such detritus stirs.

Dressed in a long white coat, pale pants, and white shoes (costume by Sonya Berlovitz), Corning introduces the departed: her father, her mother, the large extended family around the dinner table, a lover, her childhood self. In a series of short vignettes, we see how patterns of movement define a person’s essence, how they change over time, what gets lost and what remains. Iain Court’s lighting schema is dark – rectangles of light define playing spaces, echoing the shapes of the boxes and tables, and Corning often moves in and out of the light, appearing and disappearing like the ghosts she dances with. Corning conjures objects from among the boxes, and imbues them with the spirits of the dead. In a particularly poignant scene, a jacket allows her one last embrace from her father.

Phrases projected on the wall of boxes offer touchpoints for reflection: “There never seemed enough of you to go around”; “How did it get so late so soon?” At times the sentiment felt a bit too on-the-nose – this work has less of the mystery and metaphor that I usually find most compelling in Corning’s work. But I can’t think of another local artist who is so intrepidly and bravely taking on the subject of aging and offering audiences the opportunity to linger a while – to remain, as it were – with the losses that inevitably come as we grow older.

“Right of Way”- CorningWorks

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In the opening scene of Beth Corning’s new piece Right of Way, Corning dances a pas de deux with a series of descriptive words that are immediately recognizable as “gendered”: positive terms that get used to describe men (like “strong” and “virile”) cascade and cavort with the more negative attributions given to women (“overbearing”; “slut”; “bitch”). The words draw her on; she pushes back. Her body is shaped and pressured by the language; she tries to shove the words aside.

It’s an eloquent opening for a piece that seeks to examine the performative nature of gender identity. Taking more than one cue from Judith Butler, Corning’s opening emphasizes that gender roles are pre-scripted for us by social expectation; from there, Right of Way proceeds to demonstrate – through a series of short dance-plus-spoken-word vignettes – Butler’s central insight that gender is an act, a series of socially constrained and compelled performances that fabricate the fiction of a gender identity.

Corning’s partner in this work is the terrific local drag artist Jezebel Bebbington D’Opulence. In the first half of the show, both dancers appear sans makeup and glitz, in matching drab shapeless costumes, a move that signals clearly their refusal to “perform” a gendered identity, even as a voiceover insists on asking subjects how they identify themselves. But social expectations aren’t easily refused; a solo by D’Opulence reveals the challenges she faced growing up as a girl in a boy’s body in Puerto Rico, and another featuring Corning centers on the ways women, needing to be ever-vigilant of their safety, are refused the “privilege of obliviousness” that gives men full access to public space.

The second half of the show throws the performance of gender into high relief. D’Opulence emerges like a butterfly out of a cocoon, a Tina Turner lookalike in a bright red bra, tight sequined dress, and fantastically high spiked heels, and proceeds to read from Butler about how drag exemplifies the performative nature of gender identity. The incongruity between D’Opulence’s glam presence and the density of Butler’s prose is amusing, but I’m not sure we needed Butler to get the point: D’Opulence’s subsequent near-flawless lip-sync of Turner’s Proud Mary, juxtaposed immediately after by Corning’s rather less successful attempt to strut around in a tight skirt and high heels “doing” sexy womanliness cements the point home in a more spectacular manner. Femininity’s a performance, and just because you’re born with the right plumbing doesn’t mean it comes easy to you.

“Beckett & Beyond” at CorningWorks

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At one point in Beth Corning’s new dance theater piece, Beckett & Beyond, the three dancers – Corning, Yvan Auzely, and Francoise Fournier – gazelle around the space, lifting their hands rhythmically in unison. It’s a joyous, transcendent moment of flow; they’ve captured something, together, that links them in shared purpose and accomplishment. And then, just like that, it’s gone: the energy dissipates, the gestures don’t match, the flow has slipped their grasp, and what felt triumphant now feels like a hollow echo. The dancers find themselves back in their own little mundane worlds, with only the memory of that instant of flow to drive them on.

In many ways that moment is a microcosm for the structure of Corning’s piece, which – taking inspiration from two short plays by Samuel Beckett – juxtaposes the tedium of repetitive action and non-action with electrifying flashes of insight and connection. And wouldn’t most of us agree that this is essentially what life is all about? That is: fleeting moments of blissful, in-the-moment connectedness (or mastery, or sheer joy) that punctuate long stretches of striving for, and either failing to achieve or losing grasp of, those moments?

Yvan Auzely

Beckett & Beyond opens with Beckett’s “Act Without Words II,” a piece that involves two large sacks and a “goad” (a long stick). The goad prods the first sack, and a dancer (Fournier) emerges – she is depressive, slow, a physical and psychological mess. She sighs, prays, takes a pill, dresses, picks up the two sacks, attempts to drag them off stage, gets about a step along, stops, undresses, takes another pill, prays, sighs, and gets back into her sack. The goad prods the other sack, and another dancer (Auzely) emerges – he is energetic, precise, and efficient, and he goes through his rather more complicated preparatory regime before picking up both sacks and dragging them a step or two, reversing his actions, and getting back in the sack. Another goad, the first dancer reappears, repeats her actions – and so it would go, we must realize, ad infinitum. The goad will get longer and longer, the two sack-inhabitants will never know of each other’s existence, the dragging of the sacks will never end, and the Sisyphean nature of existence is comically laid bare.

Riffing on this opening, the original choreographic movement that follows presents a bittersweet take on the question “what happens between life and death?” Dressed in costumes reminiscent of the clowns in Waiting for Godot, the three dancers build small vignettes and variations on that theme. Images recur: the red rope that tethers Corning to an unseen master becomes an enormous cat’s cradle for Auzely’s acrobatic solo, and also (in a rather haunting and resonant sequence) a clothesline on which Fournier hangs clothes that signal past lives, clothes which she “births” from under her enormous Beckettian overcoat. The dancers collide, connect, and disperse, and in the process they find those all-too-evanescent instances of aliveness that slip out of reach the moment they try to hold them.

The third movement consists of Rockaby, another short play by Beckett featuring a “prematurely old” woman, a rocking chair, and the woman’s recorded voice. The repetitive text, which represents the woman’s internal monologue as she reaches the end of her life, here takes on the quality of a bedtime story for a child refusing to fall asleep, and the woman’s insistence on “more” after each long pause links her end-of-life refusal to obey the command “time she stopped” to the toddler’s desire for more time in the day. Rockaby demands the kind of patience not every audience member can muster (a teenager behind me in the audience on opening night could be heard to protest “No!” after the third or fourth time she cried out “more”), but it also rewards that patience with a heightened awareness of our own ticking clock, and of our own experience of – and use of – the time we are given.

There is sadness here, but also a wry humor – Corning invites her audience to ponder how little of life we really live without getting sentimental or new age-y about it. The Beckettian humor is underlined by Stephanie Mayer-Staley’s whimsical set, which is arrayed with cartoon-like white clouds that are reminiscent of the surrealistic landscapes of René Magritte. Iain Court’s lighting design establishes a variety of moods and textures, from playful to sombre to eerie, and, as always, Corning has set the work to terrific music (by MaryEllen Childs, Kronos Quartet, and Meredith Monk). The cleverly comical postscript to the piece – in which the first act is reprised, with a pair of young dancers (Taylor Knight and Anna Thompson) in the sacks – hammers home both how unique Corning’s vision is, and how much the maturity and experience of her company’s “over-forty” dancers add to the work. For while the younger dancers are fine performers in their own right, it was also clear that they are merely at the very beginning of the long, difficult, and Sisyphean journey that has produced the depth, richness, and complexity in the performances given by Auzely, Fournier, and Corning herself.