Evaluation: A Fierce Readability of Imaginative and prescient in ‘J’ai Pleuré Avec les Chiens’

At the start of Daina Ashbee’s “J’ai Pleuré Avec les Chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction),” we hear the placid voice of the New Age writer Louise Hay, who printed the favored self-help e-book “You Can Heal Your Life” in 1984. “This tape is about therapeutic,” Hay says. “How wholesome are you?”

Within the low gentle of a studio-theater at Gibney’s Agnes Varis Performing Arts Middle, the place the audacious “J’ai Pleuré” had its New York premiere over the weekend, 5 dancers had been crawling, bare, throughout the ground. Remoted for some time, they ultimately made contact as one climbed atop one other: two our bodies stacked on all fours, a precarious association that may reconfigure itself many instances over the work’s risky, typically gripping 80 minutes.

Ashbee, an Indigenous artist from British Columbia (of Cree, Métis and Dutch heritage), has garnered a lot consideration internationally for dances that usually push the physique to unsettling extremes. In her early 30s, she has already introduced a retrospective of works created in her 20s. “J’ai Pleuré,” her first group piece — solos and duets have been her focus — demonstrates each the uncertainty of shifting in a brand new choreographic path and a fierce readability of imaginative and prescient.

Within the work’s opening moments, pressure simmers. Initially, Hay’s accompanying musings sound affordable, even clever: “The physique is at all times speaking to us, if we’ll solely take the time to hear.” However they turn into more and more questionable, as she posits that “all sickness is self-created” and “we select our mother and father; we select our intercourse, our colour, our nation.” The piercing whimper of a canine — an alarming interruption — drowns out her voice. (The title interprets to “I cried with the canines.”)

This cry of misery ushers in what might be a unique method to therapeutic: one created on the artists’ personal phrases, taking significantly the interconnection of the self with social constructions (and with different species). Channeling canine conduct, the dancers — with formidable conviction — bark, moan, grunt, howl and pant. Alone and in pairs, they wrest themselves into extreme contortions and painful-looking balances, generally coming proper up near the viewers, which surrounds them on three sides.

At first this all resembles a type of self-torture, intensified by ominous drones and squawks within the intermittent rating (by Sean MacPherson, Ashbee and Gabriel Nieto, who can also be one of many dancers). But intriguingly, it evolves into one thing extra like play, one dancer tagging one other as an invite to perilously accomplice. Nieto lies on his again, legs up, supporting Greys Vecchionacce in a suspended handstand. In a similar way, Audrey Sides teeters horizontally on the soles of Elise Vanderborght’s toes. Irene Martínez does a headstand on her personal, legs arching again in a physics-defying curve. All of them seem to take nice pleasure in these feats.

At instances, the provocations of “J’ai Pleuré” appear unmoored from a deeper basis, looking for to shock for shock’s sake. However by the tip, the piece unmistakably finds its sense of goal, most potently in a duet for Nieto and Vecchionacce, which appears like a mourning and a reclamation. Whereas the poetic lighting dims, as if to sign an finish, the 2 conjure a brand new starting in a transporting call-and-response, a sound between a growl and a wail flowing from their our bodies. As Nieto traverses the perimeter of the house, Vecchionacce punches, stamps and spins within the middle, a panoramic drive. When all 5 dancers reunite ultimately, lights up on their uncovered our bodies, one thing has been healed.

J’ai Pleuré Avec les Chiens (Time, Creation, Destruction)

Jan. 13-14 at Gibney Dance; gibneydance.org.