Tag Archives: shakespeare

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

“Love’s Labour’s Lost” is a Win for Seattle Shakespeare Company

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David Quicksall as Don Armado and Donna Wood as Jacquenetta in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: John Ulman)

Mike Dooly as Costard and Donna Wood as Jacquenetta in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: John Ulman)

Rebecca Olson as Katharine, Scott Ward Abernethy as Boyet and Samara Lerman as the Princess of France in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: John Ulman)

George Mount as Sir Nathaniel, David Quicksall as Don Armado and Allan Armstrong as Holofernes in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: John Ulman)

Kayla Lian as Rosaline and Paul Stuart as Berowne in Seattle Shakespeare Company’s 2013 production of “Love’s Labour’s Lost” (Photo: John Ulman)

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Seattle Shakespeare Company is making a strong argument for your choice of Love’s Labour’s Lost (through April 6) as your favorite of Shakespeare’s comedies. This is astonishing as the play has a reputation for being as unwieldy as its title and riddled with obscure intellectual banter and philosophy. It includes scenes full of Latin, wordplay comprehensible only by footnote, and the utterance of the word honorificabilitudinitatibus (I dare you even to try say it).

There isn’t a weak link in the production — in fact, two immense strengths raise it from Seattle Shakespeare Company’s reliable competence to something approaching greatness. These strengths are found in newcomers: Paul Stuart, in the leading role of Berowne, delivers the text with ringing clarity and nonchalant charisma in his Northwest debut. Also new and notable is first-time Seattle Shakespeare Company director Jon Kretzu.

Kretzu’s production begins before the audience enters with a rowdy party populated by infantile young men one might take for frat boys in white tie and tails. There is also a battle-scarred Il Capitano, a black cravated boy, and a malevolent-looking derelict clown. Everyone is in action with one exception who appears to be a kind of servant (a riveting Brandon J. Simmons). He is a monument of stillness and a foreboding counterweight who leaves a lasting impression with hardly a word.

There isn’t much plot to Love’s Labour’s Lost. The King of Navarre (Jason Sanford) and the young men of his court swear oaths to three years of ascetic study without romance. They break those oaths when visited by the princess of France (Samara Lerman) and her attending ladies. Meanwhile there’s some vulgar clowning and academic wordplay by the commoners and Don Armado (David Quicksall).

While the first half of this performance establishes and then breaks the academic oaths the second half is all revels. The conflict is mostly flirtatious teasing and merriment. If there is an antagonist, it is the persistence of youthful indiscretion. In all the frivolity, frat-boy antics drive the young men, taking them nearly over the top before they give action to their yearnings. The anarchic devolution of their revels into baiting and abuse is cut short by the shocking denouement—which is only an emotional shock and overtly predictable as plot. These young men refuse to mature until forced to it.

While Stuart stands out boldly the rest of the cast does fine work as well including Donna Wood who appears to be reprising her role from last year’s Seattle Shakes production of As You Like It. Though that show’s Audrey had far more to say than does this show’s Jaquenetta, Wood owns the type in both instances.

David Quicksall makes Don Adriano de Armado surprisingly likable, playing up his vulnerability to deflate a potentially grating arrogance. The Spaniard winds up falling into the vein of Sir Toby Belch and Falstaff.

Mike Dooly goes more flat-out commedia with his Costard. Dooly takes this play’s most overt clown to the dangerous territory of Harpo Marx with a leer replacing Harpo’s relatively innocent smile. For him life is sex, wine, food, sleep, and casual violence, and yet he is irresistible.

The technical work is excellent across the board with lights, set, and sound all heightened without distracting, and costumes that hew to both character and the 1920s setting. Kretzu pushes the limits a bit with physical and prop bits that start to feel gimmicky but the gimmicks are a phase on the way to stratosphere of either silliness or mayhem. Marleigh Driscoll’s props are key in these achievements with a collection of period oddities that tug the staging into focus.

Kretzu counters the antics with a sudden gut-punching turn to darkness that leaves the whole theatre suspended. That balance fits this comedy, as it ends with only the promise of still-distant nuptials. Thankfully audience satisfaction and lightened hearts are immediate and guaranteed.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

An Off the Boards Discussion of Annie Dorsen’s “A Piece of Work”

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Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)
Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)

Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (formerly known as False Peach) came and went from On The Boards last weekend but the conversation goes on — at least it has at Slog, and between this critic and his editor. As I submitted my review I summarized my impressions. This led to a discussion of the show, its intentions, achievements and potential. An edited version of that discussion follows.

SDW: I didn’t much enjoy the show — at least not emotionally. Intellectually I loved it and in no small part because I felt like it failed kind of spectacularly as theatre. This is all the more interesting to me because it feels very close to success. A bit more humanization one way or another could have brought it together.

MVB: I talked to Annie Dorsen [the show’s creator] in advance but still wasn’t quite sure what to expect. It’s also a hard show to review in that the audience will see a different thing every night, as the algorithm reorders itself.

It felt a bit unfinished, and in need of tuning, as a piece. I think the algorithm was accidentally dropping names and scene IDs.

But the main thing I got from it is its resistance (as you noted) to telling me a theatre-story in any way. It was a bit like “an alien writes a play after reading Hamlet.” The alien has no idea about plot structure or character or relationship, all it can do is see word patterns: sets of prepositional phrases. Phrases that being with “O.” It seizes on “favorite” phrases to repeat, like an autistic person sometimes enjoys echoing things. It has a set of literal associations with set direction.

Dorsen talked a good fight about Hamlet as this ur-humanist text, and how this might redress that illusion of personal agency, but I think in fact you could walk out of it feeling a bit affirmed, as a humanist, that there is something more to consciousness than RAM and subroutines.

The failure of the piece as theatre I think rests on the context for it — if you include Dorsen & Co. in, then it’s a story about this attempt to present an algorithmic performance, and the inability of their creation to connect with 95 percent (?) of the audience. As a performance that you just walk in to, the failure is more obvious. You have to understand what is being attempted to “get” it on any level with emotional stakes. I like your notion [in the review] of an installation — what makes the creators think a computer has any interest in a set running time?

That reminds me, I meant to reference David Ives’s Words, Words, Words in which three monkeys (named Kafka, Milton, and Swift) are left in a room with typewriters to see if they’ll eventually write Hamlet. (You really think the percentage of disconnected in the audience was as high as 95 percent?) I was also fascinated by a sense that many thought Scott Shepherd [the lone actor to appear on stage, and then only briefly] was about to say something, and might not have entered for applause but for another scene just before the crew joined him.

Ha! I wasn’t thinking of Ives, but I definitely had a monkeys/typewriters association.

I may be exaggerating. The OtB crowd is famously tolerant of experiment, but I didn’t get the sense that most people were anything but puzzled by it. I think they probably wanted Shepherd to say something, at the close, to be human.

Neurologically, it’s an interesting experiment, because it frustrates the if-then “narrator” in everyone’s head that typically makes sense of things. It’s a bit Zen: boredom and frustration are cultivated as a way of turning off the monkey-mind. After peak boredom, the mind is more associative, less linear, more accepting of this “random” walk through a text.

It still may not amount to much; people have different interests, and this monkeying with consciousness may not rate that highly.

I feel like this show is more successful run as an experiment, asking people to record how they interact with it. Give them a survey on the way in. Seattle would get a kick out of that if they felt they weren’t being messed with.

I’m interested in your point about experimental theatre as an experiment in the double blind sense. Do you think the neurological experiment side of A Piece of Work would have been as interesting had Shepherd delivered the piece in its entirety? What if the only change were that Shepherd delivered all of the vocalizations instead of the computer-generated voices? Also, do you know if Shepherd was repeating lines delivered in his ear from the computer? What’s his role in this? I feel like his performance mostly served to highlight the non-theatricality of the rest of the performance.

I love your notion that the audience wanted him to say something, to act. I want to believe that this was intentional on the part of Dorsen, et al.

I think people would respond much more readily to the idea of a survey than a “talkback.” It’s weird, but people love being in experiments, so long as they know they are contributors to them.

Yeah, I think as far as frustrating that sense-making compulsion goes, plenty of plays already accomplish a similar thing with actual actors. Had Shepherd continued with gibberish, it would have gotten to people as well, just maybe taken a little longer. It’s when the play is all-computer that you realize you have to abandon all hope. :)

That said, I think Annie was trying for other effects by computerizing the space — I know she had this notion of the Hamlet text itself as a ghost of theatre, and if you step back, you can see that: sounds, lights going on and off. Is it a dramatic idea? Maybe not so much.

Re: Shepherd, she said something to me that was a (it turns out rare) emotional response, which is that sometimes (like with the chatbot play) she gets the sense that the bots are so close to thinking…that they’re trying really to say something, but fail, and it’s sad. Knowing of course that she’s investing them with agency, etc. But I felt like Shepherd’s role underscored that duality — a human actor who can’t quite make sense.

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What about you, our readers; what did you think of A Piece of Work? Did you make it to the end? Did you walk out? Did you hope that Shepherd was about to speak when he returned to the stage? Did you relish every “O” like Ives’s monkey, Kafka, who types page after page of the letter K? Did the algorithms create a more perfect Hamlet on Friday or Saturday night? Would you like to participate in a post-show survey? Now’s your chance.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

At On the Boards, A Piece of Work Challenges Noble Reason, Finite Faculty

Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen's A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)
Scott Shepherd in Annie Dorsen’s A Piece of Work (Photo: Jim Findlay)

In A Piece of Work (formerly False Peach) Annie Dorsen aims to push the limits of the definition of theatre. For many in the audience at On The Boards on Thursday night she exceeded those limits. Some expressed this by walking out, others by nodding off. In the end the applause was sustained if polite.

Dorsen has given considerable thought to what she’s attempting in this work, most notably in her essay On Algorithmic Theatre (published in Yale’s Theater magazine, 42:3) but the theory is only valuable inasmuch as it plays out in performance.

The performance of A Piece of Work consists of two distinct parts. In the first part, which is less than a quarter of the running time, Scott Shepherd delivers a very present and deeply felt performance of a jumbled repetitive take on the text of Hamlet, focused mostly on the play’s (and perhaps all of theatre’s) most famous and iconic soliloquy. His performance is broken up by the projection of code on a drop upstage and seems derived from the algorithms associated with that code that drive the rest of the show.

The rest of the performance consists of words projected on that drop as they are vocalized by what sounds like computer-generated voices. The words are often accompanied by character names. Sometimes specific areas of the stage are illuminated and underscoring and sound effects are heard suggesting preordained relationships between words, sound, light, and atmosphere effects such as wind and fog.

Though much of the performance follows the chronology of Hamlet the words rarely hold together to follow Shakespeare’s script for more than a phrase or two. The algorithms that govern them would seem to be written to avoid clarity.

Dorsen’s essay suggests that she’s interested in engaging the audience by giving us work to do in order to form meaning, however she doesn’t give us enough sense of success in that work to feel any hope for satisfying achievement. The audience’s interest in the work gives way to boredom.

For those familiar with Hamlet much of the audience’s work is not so much in making meaning as reconstructing a pre-existing meaning. We attend with the expectation of a relationship with the play we know therefore we spend our energy looking for the familiar rather than creating the new. We reassemble the play in our minds, identifying a phrase and working to place it in the expected order and attach it to the appropriate character.

Great works of theatre often take a thing we know, whether a universal story or a well-known plot, and change small pieces of it in order to help us see it and our world anew. A Piece of Work takes the opposite approach, reordering the context and fabric of the piece to raise questions about larger structures including our understanding of the performer/audience relationship.

One way A Piece of Work jostles the performer/audience relationship is in its dependence on the written word. In this regard Shepherd’s involvement is striking as he is best known for his role in Elevator Repair Service’s Gatz. This highly lauded adaptation of The Great Gatsby is performed by actors who say every word of the novel as it comes to life in a workday spent waiting for computer repairs.

Shepherd, in the role of the narrator, Nick Caraway, had the lion’s share of the work in Gatz, which the New York Times’s Ben Brantley described as the “…layering of a novel’s world onto your own everyday environment” as when a novel “…so absorbs you that you start to imagine everyone around you as a character in it.” A Piece of Work does the opposite. Here the words disorient and disconnect as when attention drifts from the page and it suddenly becomes apparent that one has read the same passage several times over.

The projections of text make this as much a reading exercise as a performance. The words are performing objects, doubling their audible selves. The shape of the word Polonious becomes associated with an aggravated, aged voice delivering that character’s lines; it becomes the performing object or puppet of that character. The lights catch areas of the stage suggesting the place where those words are acted and the play unfolds. It is an extreme form of puppetry but is it theatre?

In her essay, Dorsen notes that “algorithmic performance creates an asymmetric relationship, in which the human spectator confronts something that can’t confront her back.” In other words, the performance is one-sided: the computer produces and the audience observes and responds.

Dorsen refers to Peter Brook’s suggestion that theatre requires no more than one person observing another. In performance A Piece of Work evinces the notion that this theory requires revision. In fact such theorists as Susan Bennett and Daphna Ben Chaim have suggested that the distinction between the theatrical and the simply performative lies in the communal interaction of performer and audience.

It is not enough for one person to watch another in order to make theatre. The observed must be aware of that observation and respond to it. Dorsen and company ask audiences to give their attention but we receive no attention in return and so the deal falls apart. A Piece of Work feels less like theatre than a temporal art installations in the dark corner of the museum that one peeks into for a time before walking out, which may be all we owe it.

Arts & Entertainment, Theatre

Love Songs and Negotiations from She She Pop and Their Fathers

She She Pop and Their Fathers: Testament (Photo: She She Pop)
She She Pop and Their Fathers: Testament (Photo: She She Pop)

On the Boards‘ Lane Czaplinski sums up how many (if not most) of us would first react to She She Pop‘s Testament (last performance Sunday night at OtB; tickets): “The thought of my dad on stage in a highfalutin Lear terrifies me. What would he say and do?”

There’s a reason the rambunctious elderly feature in comedy so often — we’re scared of them.

But there’s another level to the German performance collective’s work that is even more terrifying, which is that parents are mortal — their decline, physical and mental, ends in death, which they are necessarily not around to give their children help in navigating.

Testament is a tender but tough-minded response to that absence, both a way of preparing oneself to be gone, no longer able to exert influence or offer aid; and to be left, no longer able to argue with or embrace.

She She Pop are careful not to call themselves actors, in the sense of people who are there purely to entertain you: “Instead, we give ourselves and others interesting tasks to fulfill and solve them in public on stage,” they write in the program notes. In this case, “others” means three of their fathers.

This doesn’t mean the collective members are not technically proficient performers — they even harmonize with boy-band precision.

But what the cast — Lisa Lucassen, Sebastian and his father Joachim Bark, Fanni and her father Peter Halmburger, and Ilia and her father Theo Papatheodorou — are doing is amending Shakespeare’s King Lear as if it were a contract: highlighting relevant areas, striking out lines, writing in new directives. (Not everyone who participated in the show’s creation appears: Johanna Freiburg, Mieke and Manfred Matzke, Berit Stumpf. Sometimes the performers trade other father-daughter parts.) The fathers wear fatherly outfits, while the younger generation wears Lea Søvsø’s Shakespearean ruffled collars, and breeches.

Much of the show was generated in rehearsals, as the fathers and daughters (and son) read and discussed Lear, and grappled both with the text, and with its modern-day analogues: last wills and testaments, costs of elder care, the day-to-day dramas of intergenerational attitudes in conflict. For the show, in a Brechtian touch, the performers don headphones and flatly repeat taped recordings from rehearsal, which at times contrasts strongly with the heated upset of the language.

The three fathers are almost all in agreement that the show demands a loss of dignity (less so in the U.S., I imagine, than back home, where people they might know socially could attend). For the first few acts, they sit to the left in plush recliners, acting as a world-weary Greek chorus: When they aren’t speaking themselves, they trade knowing glances about the younger generation. The wisdom of the papa is captured perfectly by the former physicist’s attempt to fix Lear by writing out a differential equation that optimizes Lear’s “darker purpose”: arranging a competition of sorts to divide up his kingdom among his three daughters.

Oh yeah? respond the daughters (and son), working out a tremendously detailed accounting of how grandparental affection and support is distributed unequally among child-having and childless offspring. This is all light-hearted enough, even though it touches on very real issues, and the fathers tend to bridle a bit at discussing it in public.

But the scene where a daughter recites the list of things she’s preparing herself for as her father ages (wiping his pee off the toilet, cooking soft foods, listening again to that anecdote), and he singspiels “I Will Always Love You” — that cuts right to the bone.

For  Lear‘s storm, the fathers unburden themselves of their anxiety about their children’s future in theatre, their discomfort with what they perceive as simple exhibitionism, and their uncertainty over whether their kids are any good. Judging from the startled, pained laughter in the audience, more than a few people had been through the same ordeal with their parents. Sven Nichterlein’s lighting, Christopher Uhe’s music, and Florian Fischer’s sound turn the scene into a Pips-meets-punk freak-out.

One of most effective staging elements is that cameras are used to create projected portraits of whoever sits in the recliners. While the fathers watch their children onstage, the audience sees them looking out at them, head-on. It may be a virtue of necessity — though the fathers are all good public speakers, the arrangement lets them maintain a certain personal distance — but it directs the fatherly gaze at the audience, its judgment and approvals, its half-grins and raised eyebrows, its cool removal. Later, as the three 70-somethings strip down, you get a sense of the gift in the action.

It’s a gift extended to the audience. Very few moments in theatre are so theatrically Greek in this way, where the staged imitation of an action, for all its artifice, instantiates another, augmented reality. You know, King Lear is an old man lost and out of his mind in a storm, there’s a story there you may or may not relate to — the ritual of mimesis is different, more bedrock. You participate first, make sense of it later.

In a perfect world, we’d all have She She Pop’s experience, we’d all sit down while there’s time, we’d all be willing — but we live in a world of shortcomings, of our own and others. Lear is a tragedy, the foolish father a scapegoat for all our failings, driven out. She She Pop invites him in. It’s not a metaphor — there they are, three fathers, onstage, performing the way fatherhood slips out of older, tremor-shaken hands. If you are there, you feel lucky to see the majesty in it.

Arts & Entertainment, Film & TV

The Sessions Gets Under the Skin of Sexual Surrogacy, Slightly

Clever camera angles play down John Hawkes‘ enormous wide honker in the new dramedy The Sessions, hence playing up Hawkes’ resemblance to Robert Downey, Jr., which is of course part of director/writers Ben Lewin‘s game plan. As polio victim Mark O’Brien, who’s down (on a gurney) but not out, Hawkes has a naturalistic game to play and plays it through. We know this is a Hollywood version of naturalism because we never see Hawkes having to go to the bathroom and none of his attendants ever lose their shit at the nice man who’s paralyzed from the neck down.

The sex surrogate chosen to relieve Mark of his virginity is played by Helen Hunt, who got boldly naked for a paralyzed man twenty years ago in The Waterdance and goes considerably futher skin-wise here. We know this is a Hollywood movie because “boldly” means we get to see every inch of Helen Hunt, while we never see John Hawkes below the very top of the groin, hence preserving a time-honored double standard involving the penis as the final taboo. The movie makes warmly comic hay out of the societal fixation on penile vaginal penetration as the one true sex, hence setting up Mark O’Brien’s hangups as well as reinforcing them as long-held societal hangups. But in a movie set in Berkeley, you’d hope for more questioning of authority. Even authority of ideas.

I don’t mean to sound entirely grumpy at this film. Hawkes and and Hunt seem so utterly plausible as implausible people that they deserve all the praise; it’s three for three if you add William H. Macy as a priest who actually makes Catholicism seem warm and non-condemning.

I do recommend O’Brien’s original autobiographical article, which you’ll find here, and which gives a story messier, sadder, and more oddly touching than Lewin’s screenplay. O’Brien confesses his anxieties, his sexual disappointments in body, mind, and spirit–but also his urge to recite Shakespeare to his surrogate.  “Our culture values youth, health, and good looks, along with instant solutions,” he quite rightly writes, “… I fear getting nothing but rejections. But I also fear being accepted and loved. For this latter happens, I will curse myself for all the time and life that I have wasted.” The film could have put some more of that in its pipe to smoke.

As a final aside, I’ll mention that O’Brien died on the Fourth of July, 1999, age 49, after a life and career filled with grunting frustration and poetic insight. His surrogate, Cheryl Cohen Greene, is still alive and practicing, although she’s lucky enough to live in an area where surrogacy is approved of.

Arts & Entertainment, Dance

At Spectrum, Donald Byrd Gives “Needless Talents” Human Faces

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Cara-May Marcus and Ty Alexander Cheng in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

Jade Solomon Curtis and Stacie L. Williams in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

The Spectrum Dance troupe in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

Alex Crozier-Jackson and Stacie L. Williams in Spectrum's Theater of Needless Talents (Photo: Nate Watters)

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More frequently in Seattle these days, you might catch yourself in an act of arts-going self-envy.

Where typically you might be reading about a blockbuster week in New York, or Edinburgh, or Avignon, and wishing yourself there, this week you could attend back-to-back performances of Kidd Pivot‘s The Tempest Replica (our review) at On the Boards and Spectrum Dance‘s Theater of Needless Talents (at the SDT Studio through October 28; tickets). These are both major works, and that’s following last weekend’s City Arts Festival, which itself set a new benchmark for arts installation and performance curation in Seattle.

This matters because however the arts move you–maybe they elevate, maybe they take you downtown–they can only move you so far, singly. But together, they can shift your center of gravity, fragment your perspective, create new harmonies. Urban density makes a city take place–arts density makes minds take place, just as if you were walking along a Jane Jacobs sidewalk, encountering artworks as you go. (She called it the “ballet of the good city sidewalk,” in fact.)

It’s an engine of serendipity, letting you tussle with Shakespeare one night, and a response to the Holocaust the next, and in so doing, witness the construction of a city of cities.

To bring this back down to earth, consider choreographer Donald Byrd’s statement that, with The Theater of Needless Talents, he wanted to get into how particular humans keep finding ways to commit atrocities against humanity. Rather than totalizing Nazi power, buying into the Reich’s myth, his work, iconoclastic as ever, breaks it into pieces: At the outset, members of the troupe recite the statistics of who killed, who was killed, where they lived–you see a spate of killings, setting off more killings. Contingency re-enters the history.

The stark set (designed and originally lit by Jack Mehler, with lighting here by Rico Chiarelli) is a bare floor, with a square box taped out, divided into tic-tac-toe format; above the dancers are blocks you surmise are inspired by the Berlin Holocaust Memorial. The plain curtain is sketched out in the style of Terezín artworks. That, in conjunction with the period-ish (for dancers’ purposes) costumes by Jessica Markiewicz is all that’s needed to create the dread and (fatalistic) joy of the era.

Byrd is fascinated in this piece, slightly revised for these performances, by what’s known as “negative capability,” defined variously, but most famously by Keats as an ability to meet manifold reality without filtering it through your identity first. For Byrd, the cabaret-style performances in the concentration camp Terezín are emblematic of this state of mind. Was it a courageous way to reclaim their humanity? A form of denial? Submission to Nazi whim? A morale boost? Was it all of these things?

In composer Erwin Schulhoff, who died in a concentration camp in Wülzburg, Bavaria, Byrd has found a fellow iconoclast and outsider, with a similar taste for experimentation in forms and genres. The work uses Schulhoff’s Duo for Violin and Cello (1925), Hot Music, 10 Studies in Syncopation; 5 Etudes in Jazz; Suites Dansant en Jazz; and the second movement from his Sonata for Cello and Piano (1914). Performers are pianist Judith Cohen, remarkably adept at bridging classical and jazz; and violinist James Garlick and cellist Rajan Krishnaswami, the last of Simple Measures, who drew bravos during their bows.

At times, Byrd has used dance to find the extremes in music; here, the music is in extremis, and his choreography, often tender. Where it startles–a dancer drops to the floor as if shot in the head, early on, though the dance continues–it is not dramatic so much as an intrusion of that reality. I think a book could be written about the difference (it is anti-dramatic to lose people randomly, when the murder is no mystery), so I have to leave it at that: the impact of subtraction.

Derek Crescenti acts as a mouthpiece for former camp members, and his forceful, direct delivery does not need any “for a dancer” qualifications. The remembrances of prisoners (when a guard told a child her mother was probably that smoke over there, coming out of that smokestack; when Mengele sewed the twins together; when an inmate realized he felt giddy at not having to worry about being put in a concentration camp anymore, since he was in one) set up the scenes that follow, though Byrd is very attentive to the music, so there is juxtaposition as much as dramatization.

Shadou Mintrone gets comedic dances, with Chaplinesque pratfalls, big grins, jazz hands–all tinged with the hysteria of someone driving themselves not to crack, to lift the spirits of others. Jade Solomon Curtis does crack–her index finger practices becoming a gun to her temple, again and again. Donald Jones, Jr., and Kate Monthy dance a torrid, bittersweet duet with an invisible third member, the prospect of separation. Bodies knot up, bend into impossible shapes, lock themselves to each other. Bodies shake, go limp with illness, exhaustion, and yet there’s always someone so hungry for human touch that they can’t let go, who lifts the body like luggage they’ll carry with them.

People were not always made into different or better people by circumstances: Ty Alexander Cheng is caught between two women, Mintrone and Cara-May Marcus, and if one falls, another is there to pull him in. Marcus has the expressive face of a silent movie star, and she is not always in control, but you can’t look away. Just as Schulhoff interpolated jazz, Byrd brings in popular dance, a few steps, a tango-like series. Hands slap the flat of the inner thigh like percussion, and punishment. Marcus curls into a ball in Cheng’s arms, but woman also support men, lift them up. In a short, heart-breaking sequence, Vincent Michael Lopez and Derek Crescenti portray a gay couple whose embraces are both a desperate solace and furtive.

At the close, Byrd revisits the earlier recitation of statistics, his troupe updating them into a roar of what sounds like ceaseless slaughter since World War II. In the program notes, he quotes President Obama: “Awareness without action changes nothing.”

Then consider the coincidence that, for Keats, the master of negative capability was Shakespeare, author of The Tempest. In Pite’s telling–which opens with Prospero (Eric Beauchesne) triggering Ariel (the incredible Sandra Marín Garcia) with the phrase “shipwreck,” and an astonishing cinematic spectacle of projected rain, billowing gauze curtains, and dancers rolling on a “pitching” deck–negative capability is humanity. Up until Prospero lets himself take in what is present before him, his frozen vengefulness (its origins told in an enrapturing shadow-puppet show) is in turn recapitulated in his puppetry of actual people.

Because this is an interpretation, I think there’s a case, as well, for considering the players to be wrapped in folio parchment, so that Prospero’s regained humanity emerging is doubled by Pite’s choreography emerging from the text, its story. There are other, structural reasons this is intriguing–the second half is all human blossoming, both in pain and regret and anger, and in joy and expression and freedom, in counterpoint to that shipwreck spectacle, and yes, I think it’s interesting which you prefer–but side-by-side with Needless Talents, there’s that framework again of cruelty, imprisonment, and humanity hard-pressed but unconquerable.

To see both of these works is to be impressed, literally, by them. They leave a mark, they layer maps onto you, leaving everything strange and yet more real than before. You are their conversation.