New texts on dance: "DisJoint"

Register the elements: a piano fugue resounding around an empty stage, its perimeters demarcated by floor-level strip lights; the back one, lit. For Anastasia Valsamaki’s "DisJoint” is a piece that plays with elements: sounds, light, space, colours. And, of course, the dancers – Gavriela Antonopoulou, Nefeli Asteriou and Tasos Karachandis – with their steppy phrases, made of folds, hinges, lunges, tilts and quivers. Everything is as articulated as that fugue.

The piece unfolds as a sequence of separate episodes, each with its own lighting and colour – the strip lights flush from warm orange to midnight blue – and its own sound, whether the crackling of a distance recording (a scratchy, gappy repeat of that first fugue), or the dry grate of pebbles. In each episode, implicit cues between the dancers spark flurries of action and interaction. After a while, you notice that while the poetics change – here, it’s all about fleetness; there, it’s about touch and weight; elsewhere, it’s about interweaving – many of the same elements recur, like words used in different sentences.

Like several pieces on the program, “DisJoint” feels unfinished, still in its creation rather than its refining phase. But it holds much promise: it’s fascinating to watch, always clean, considered and – I’ll say it again – articulate.

A musical prelude accompanies the gradual illumination of a light installation: four lines of fluorescent bulbs run round the edges of the stage, highlighting the square canvas of the scenic space. The fugue that is heard as this empty square forms presages the entire structure of all that will unfold within it.

In this trio, the choreographer Anastasia Valsamaki proposes an “unfamiliar physicality”, a kind of non-functional movement that creates inconsistencies within the piece’s structure and composition. The dancers increase and decrease the spaces between them and develop a peculiar vocabulary, a way of speaking with one another all of their own, giving shape in this way to an incoherent architecture in motion that nevertheless manages to keep its inner spaces alive. This disjointed, fragmentary language is not only apparent in the movement vocabularies articulated by the dancers, but is also experienced in the way the work is viewed.

The difficulty I found focusing my attention in certain moments on the three dancers as a whole made me successfully experience the function of such a disjoint – which is also the title of the piece – in my vision. The breadth of my field of sight fluctuated selectively, in a non-progressive way, within the performance’s span of time: the fragmentation of the audience’s gaze led to a non-cohesive viewing of the scenic action; at times, the “inorganic” but dazzling language of the ensemble allowed for a more harmonious and comprehensive kind of observation.

The lack of flow in the movement worked harmoniously with the austere structure of the fugue, allowing the content to be foregrounded in an abstract kinetic conversation that demanded no intellectual investment on the part of the audience.

In this new work by Anastasia Valsamaki, we bear witness to the creation of a microcosm of society on stage, before our very eyes. Three performers are bounded by an illuminated frame: fluorescent lights are laid in a rectangular shape all around the edges of the stage. This lighting is there from the start of the performance, before the performers even enter, to delineate the spatial limits of the scenic action. Its changes in color seem to take place in dialogue with the scenic action, either affecting the mood of the performers, or reacting to changes in their intentions, making it an interesting aspect of the performance.

The three performers transport us to an environment where the search for communication prevails. Their movements are linear, harmonious, and completely assured. Each member of this society seeks ways to reveal their own selves to the others, while at the same time observing, provoking, and listening in on them, each jockeying for position within this construct. This communication is, however, often interrupted quite suddenly, and their intentions change. Each time a form of communication is secured, or some connection is achieved, these efforts are interrupted and new ones launched, leading in the end to a state of complete disconnection that leaves you in suspense, with a sense of incompleteness.

A piano composition that resembles a fugue – or a two-part invention – interweaves repetitive music themes. In line with the music, four horizontal neon lamps light up in sequence, defining the range of the stage – as if creating the space needed to let go of noisy everyday life and enter the singular world of the performance. Into this tranquil atmosphere enter two women and a man. Their agile bodies swivel, extend, wave, flow. They spread their arms, lengthen their limbs, creating spirals with their bodies while they traverse the stage. Their movement is lissome, sedate and playful. The dancers occasionally synchronize in ephemeral routines, never isolated from the group; they play with patterns, interacting in a constant flow even when they pause. They travel all over the stage as the neon lighting (by Apostolos Strantzalis) alters colors.

George Paterakis’ original music composition shifts in and out, immerses in silence, returns in variations and fragments, sometimes blurred like a vague memory, other times accelerated or unexpectedly cut. The performers interact with the music, in counterpoint or harmony while continuing to sway; they create pivoting patterns or thrust their arms at shoulder height even when the music stops. The choreography seems to invest in invoking our kinaesthetic responses – dancing along with the performers – rather than our narrative engagement.

The syntax that Anastasia Valsamaki delves into is both sparse and continuous. Her vocabulary manifests her trust in the material body more than abstract conceptual ideas – reminding me that the tradition of Cunningham, Forsythe and De Keersmaeker still has its persistent explorers.