Sarah Michelson Spurs ‘Devotion’ at On the Boards

The dancers don’t come out for a bow at the end of Devotion, Sarah Michelson’s grueling, 100-minute-no-intermission dance (through March 13 at On the Boards), and for practical and moral reasons that feels right. The audience applauds of course, but it applauds itself for its endurance, and the performers who are not coming because they’ve already been exhausted.

Michelson has created a via rigorosa in which the rigor is its self-reinforcing end, the way a runner’s high sends the shin-splinted hobbling out for another trot. I think there’s a lot of truth to this version, despite the Lives of the Saints‘ ad majorem dei gloriam protestations. How would you really know, anyway? It’s the extremity whose arms you fall into again and again. Michelson’s work is a sly crucible with slippery sides–once you’re in and unable to climb out, she raises the heat.

Devotion is a collaboration with Richard Maxwell, who provides the textually-dense environment. His retelling of the Creation story veers unsteadily between the poetically portentous (“Before the dawn on the earth’s ninth day, the crisp green gold of leaves and wood, vital and pleasures infinite, and what is sleep, or rest. What is day? What is night? What is sky? What is sea? All are in a stage of discovery and wonder.”) and the drily disaffected (“Mary was in a relationship with a man named Joseph.”).

This prose tumbles forth in such profusion it becomes difficult to attend to both the dance and the words, and I chose the dance. Occasionally, the text sent me down some rabbit hole of memory, which is what happens when when you chant or pray, and it seemed likely that that was the intent here as well. My sense is that both Michelson and Maxwell understand that, like a tree in a poem, the art is not in representation so much as it is in evocation: childhood wonder, dramatic relationships, unexpected parenthood. The illusion of representation distracts you so you can see.

(On the walls at On the Boards hang TM Davy’s paintings of Michelson and Maxwell, done in gloriously stately high-gloss–it’s not simply a burlesque of religious iconography, I don’t think, but an act of imagination, of placing yourself in the frame. Lives of the Saints again.)

The dancers–Rebecca Warner, Nicole Mannarino, Non Griffiths, James Tyson, Eleanor Hullihan (and actor Jim Fletcher)–are variations on a theme, sharing much of the work’s movement vocabulary, which itself is a collection of poses.

Warner is the Narrator, making a rosary-track in dance (she bends deep for something like ballet’s fourth position; encircles the air in front of her with her arms; throws her arms out behind her, fingers splayed; flies along with arms out, palms flat, like a plane whose wing is about to touch the ground). It’s the resolve, the fierce devotion to technique that comes to make this mean something–if it does. The trick about a work making a spiritual appeal is that the spirit doesn’t always come when called.

But two duos which follow have a distinct emotional appeal. Griffiths is a 14-year-old Mary (not far from the “truth,” I suppose), and Michelson gives her a hopscotch kind of jump: right leg out, land heavily on bent left, hold, repeat. She also pirouettes past endurance if you’re prone to empathetic nausea. Little girls invent Sufism every day. Her Jesus, James Tyson, in black track pants and leotard, holds his right arm out in front like a weathervane or compass needle. Griffiths dances around him, sticks her head through his elbow. Dancing to Glass’s Dance IX, Tyson steps up on his toes to the percussive beat, in a perverse counterpoint (Pete Drungle’s original music, relatively speaking, is calmer and slower-paced, though the dancers don’t seem to benefit much from it).

Jim Fletcher and Eleanor Hullihan are Adam and Eve as joggers, with Fletcher playing the role of the red-faced, sweating guy you think may have a heart attack if he keeps going. He runs to the corner and stands there (in shame, he’s Adam, after all) as Hullihan runs to and from him across the stage. Later he faces the audience and she leaps into his arms, once, twice, three times, four…bulky Fletcher is not a dancer, but his timing on his catches deserves admiration, and once again there’s the flirtation with the eternal in this repetition. (Lakoff says that our notion of forever is the unending process.) It’s a sinewy love act, a reverse Pietà, as everyone notes. I don’t know what that means, here, as a quotation. But you can’t miss the trust.