Floating Together, Staring and Circling
Vanessa Anspaugh’s ‘we were an island’ at Danspace Project
By BRIAN SEIBERTFEB. 23, 2014


we were an island The choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh has an eye for performers at Danspace Project.

No man is an island, John Donne said, and it would seem that the choreographer Vanessa Anspaugh agrees. In her “we were an island,” which debuted at Danspace Project on Thursday, the five performers are distinctive, but the connections among them are more various and ineluctable than they appear on the surface. Once the dancers have all made their entrances, no one escapes the others’ gaze.

It makes sense that they stare, since much of their behavior is strange. And the tone of it varies strangely. There are long stretches of austere silence, yet Amber Bemak’s sound design also feeds in jittery footfalls, soothing water and the warmth and beat of pop rock. The dancers broadly mime “I’m crying,” yet elsewhere they seem close to real tears.

Niv Acosta and Eleanor Smith kiss Jesse White at the same time. Then, sitting on the doubled-over back of Mr. Acosta, Ms. Smith poses with her legs wide open. Later, those two dancers stare at each other and open their mouths as wide as possible. There’s no clear story here, yet there is a sense of causality to the sequencing, as one segment or person bumps into the next. The dancers can seem less like islands than like flotsam in tidal currents, floating together.

Sometimes they’re trapped in circling eddies, and so is the dance. Strong sections lose force through overextension or by being linked to weaker material. But this hourlong work gets better as its goes. Four dancers (including Addys Gonzalez and Bessie McDonough-Thayer, but not Mr. White) lie together, as if sleeping in the same bed. When three roll in one direction and Mr. Gonzalez rolls in the other, he rolls toward Mr. White, and that sweet transition sets off a beautiful series of unexpected harmonies.

Ms. Anspaugh has an eye for performers. Mr. Gonzalez, the first dancer to enter, has a calm authority as he circles the space. Mr. Acosta does a solo of curving arms that’s somewhere between a bodybuilder’s display and a painful metamorphosis. Mr. White wears Ms. Smith’s pants on his head like a new hairstyle or an identity experiment. The others parade him as they might a horse.

But it’s the remarkable Ms. Smith who gets the biggest moment. Beneath those pants, she wears gold-sequined shorts. On her face, she wears a stricken look, and at times she shakes with strain. The others watch as she spins and spins and falls and spins some more. The solo is an island of intensity, but Ms. Anspaugh just lets it wash away.

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