The title of Miguel Gutierrez’s newest work is “Super nothing”, reaches the alternative ends of a spectrum, as if torn aside: oversaturated and empty, essential and insignificant. It evokes the contradictions of life in dance—that medium that calls for a lot effort for thus little materials reward—and of being alive typically. In a latest a conversation with Invoice T. Jones, the inventive director of New York Stay Arts, the place “Tremendous Nothing” opened Sunday, Gutierrez famous that dance or life, within the grand scheme of issues, “is a small breakthrough.”
Which does not detract from what a dance can do, or why it is likely to be obligatory. In “Tremendous Nothing,” the highly effective fruits of a two-year residency at Stay Arts, Gutierrez, 54, asks how dance can confront life’s fixed stream of grief. How can interdependent relationships assist us?
The relationships right here, full of each tenderness and wrestle, are performed out amongst a forged of 4 dancers—Jay Carlen, Justin Faircloth, Wendell Grey II and Evelyn Lillian Sanchez Narvaez—who give themselves absolutely to the night’s messy calls for. At totally different occasions they are often lovers, household, associates or strangers. Whereas Gutierrez, whose work crosses disciplines equivalent to writing, music and dance, usually makes text-filled items, “Tremendous Nothing” communicates nearly completely by means of motion, pushed by the pounding rhythms of Rosana Cabán’s immersive sound design. The exception is an introductory poem that urges us to give up our consideration and asks, “What’s going to occur? What’s going to grow to be of us?’
From this abyss of a query begins the dance. Faircloth and Grey are the primary to seem, one’s chin perched on the opposite’s shoulder, earlier than they break off on separate paths, limbs tossing and chopping with an anxiousness that may intensify over the following hour. Gutierrez developed this work partially by revisiting outdated footage of his rehearsals. This strategy of sifting by means of the archive can contribute to the general sense of fragments stitched collectively, generally with fluid inevitability, generally with jagged unpredictability.
