More dances should put people in jumpsuits, or better said, find a good reason to. In Spectrum Dance Theater‘s revival of Donald Byrd’s A Cruel New World/the new normal (at Emerald City Trapeze Arts from April 11 to 13; tickets), this blistering, anguished, and tender work seats its audiences in front of a wire fence topped with razor-wire. Behind are American detainees, imprisoned for radical beliefs about health care or marriage equality. See what you think when someone rushes the fence. Are you glad it’s there, or hoping they get out?
Jazz dance-inflected, the ensembles in orange jumpsuits (Mark Zappone’s original designs via Doris Black) might make you think it’s a West Side of Oz Story (though Byrd will correct you that Robbins didn’t, after all, invent that loping, shuffling style). This is a shift, Byrd writes in the program notes, from the original mounting, when he thought of them as refugees in a camp. Another change is the decision to have a single couple dance what were pas de deux taken by a series of dancers. The disparate stories now join up to form a larger narrative in which a couple tries to stay connected.
Set in a post-9/11 America, redolent with the imagery of extrajudicial imprisonment, A Cruel New World feels intensely personal. Its argument, in a sense, is that we construct our society brick by personal brick (the set is actually Rico Chiarelli’s, as is the moodily flickering, bare-bulb lighting, after Michael Wellborn’s original lighting). Before we can be the change we want to see, we have to determine if we can change. In this World, it takes several attempts.
It opens with a baker’s dozen of jumpsuited dancers, all crackling with animosity and a prickly ardor. At first they form up along gender lines, but divisions fracture the two groups into ones, twos, and threes. Because of the jumpsuits, the only way they have to display their status is to physically dominate someone else. Alphas are Crozier-Jackson and Marcus, a power couple on the rocks, thanks to Crozier-Jackson’s eye for Becky Mikos, among others. Throughout the hour, they struggle to coordinate emotionally — one is loving, one is disinterested, one wants to make up after a fight, the other has just worked up a head of steam because of it.
Byrd’s hyperkinetic choreography (set to music ranging from Graham Haynes to Wagner’s Liebestod) is slightly constrained in this work, owing to his setting it on a relatively inexperienced (in the Byrd idiom) troupe back in 2003. He tried both to play to their strength (jazz dance) and stretch them into balletic forms; here, the jazz dance shoe was on the other foot, as Shadou Mintrone admitted in a post-show talk. Still, the dancers eat up the floor with a feral, faux looseness that is prelude often to an attack. Arms are kept tense, out-stretched; legs slice in wide arcs or are raised slowly, to emphasize the completed extension — it’s reminiscent of a prison work-out as a display of toughness.
They heckle each other from the sidelines, or clear the benches for a free-for-all. Every so often one or two, or all, rush the fence to scream forcefully but impotently at the audience. They might ask why you’re just sitting there, or shout, “Fuck you!” and have done with it. (It’s a bit like an online comments section.) Byrd’s point is about the failure of the rant as discourse, I think, how it’s flung at you in deeply-felt frustration, but then the dancer will go back to whatever: skulking, or ganging up on someone else.
Jade Solomon Curtis and Donald Jones, Jr., get a pas de deux as well, Jones surprising with a pirouette before bearing Curtis to fearsome heights, or across the floor, waist-level, as she holds her ankles in the splits. But it’s Cara-May Marcus and Alex Crozier-Jackson who, through repeated encounters, have the chance to build a relationship in front of you. In their “love duet,” Byrd (who’s not one to shy away from explicit illustration if he feels like it) has Marcus convey emotion with dance gestures that aren’t of themselves erotic (facing Crozier-Jackson, she might use his shoulder to support her leg extension) but play on physical demands of support and trust. With Marcus pitched forward in a tripedal position, Crozier-Jackson blissfully scoots through on his back.
But it’s not enough. Finally Marcus strips off the jumpsuit, giving up her status as the “camp commandant.” Marcus’s expressive face transmits fear, fatigue (earned, she delivers a spectacular performance), and fervor, as she circles — then stands still as she is circled by — the rest of dancers, who respond to martial-sounding music with a kind of mechanized-fascist movement. They grab a huge vinyl flag and trot around with it. It’s actually horrifying, if you’re in the right space.
But then another dancer steps out of her jumpsuit. And another. The vinyl flag is used to create a box on the floor, and water begins to pour from above.
I asked Byrd about this, post-show, and he replied that he thought of it as magical realism — Marcus, his “Miranda” (Cruel New World evokes “O brave new world,” from The Tempest), has seen nothing but pain, anger, and suffering. In her renunciation of it, she’s gifted with this moment of escape. Because the show operates on a number of levels — you’re wearing your jumpsuit on your soul — the close can also be a testament to the power of the tight-knit group, fenced in or not. As everyone crowds in, gazes uplifted, you see humanity remembering what it is to be human.
