Zoe | Juniper’s BeginAgain (at On The Boards through March 30) starts with a bang, or rather a clap, stamping, and slaps. The lights rise briefly to show dancers in close formation then dim to darkness and all we hear are their movements. It’s exciting and a bit scary as the sounds come with precision and from close proximity to one another. One wonders how they stay together, unaccompanied by music or any other obvious unifying mark. One wonders how they avoid colliding.
Let’s start over.
Our first glimpse of BeginAgain comes in the lobby at On The Boards where one of Celeste Cooning’s distinctive cut paper works hangs before the theatre entry. More Cooning work hangs in the vomitoria like Tyvek cobwebs.
The performance space itself continues the wafting nature of those cobwebs with a mitered pair of curtains that appear to wave in a breeze. In fact the curtains are taught and smooth scrims. The waves are one of the many projections that provide much of the pleasure in this puppetry dance piece. Between the scrims there is a trapezoid of bare floor, and between the trapezoid, the scrims, and the audience there is loose dirt. On the stage left side dirt is a woman on her side in a plaster form.
These provocative images–the illusion of movement on the rigid scrim, the restricted motion of the cast-bound dancer, and the dance heard but unseen–present the first of several coups de theatre in BeginAgain. Though these moments are more clever than breathtaking they are astonishingly clever and often discomfiting.
Much of the dance features staccato sequences ranging from gentle fixed points to larger scaled, harsher punches and slices. The downstage dirt (it also extends into the upstage shadows of the scrims) is an area of importance, rarely entered and only after much hesitation and seeming deliberation. Much of the movement takes place on the floor upstage of the scrims. The gap and trapezoid between them become a liminal space.
Early in the show that dancer in the plaster cast breaks from her shell. Soon the process begins again with a dancer lying on the upstage side of the scrim while a boy in a suit singing in tonic sol-fas (that later give way to full-on Sacred Harp singing) applying plaster patches to her body. We are nearly always aware of this boy and the dancer (he is the only male onstage). They provide a constant against which all else happens and the gender specificity feels important, as does his suit. It is emblematic of power, even as that power is undermined by his falsetto singing.
Feminine power is amplified by both set and dance. The latter reaches a climax in an intimate pairing that grows closer and more discrete until it is all but private. The former reveals itself in another Cooning work, a huge black-on-white curtain of cut patterns that fills the upstage wall. The images are full of shapes suggesting downcast young women with ponytails on a filigree.
Whether in the complexities of power, gender, or movement dualities abound. Throughout the piece doubling suggests a surface and sublimated expression, especially when the doubling is performed on either side of a scrim. In another highlight of the piece a dancer is perfectly doubled by her shadow, projected on a scrim, which dances in an imperfect paired duet with a shadow projected on that scrim from an unseen source. Meanwhile a fourth dancer moves in sharply contrasted tension, speed and form behind the scrim.
In addition to the formal shadow puppetry the scrims and set reflect a variety of other images including video of murmurations, yellowed images of children and families, and vertical bars traveling across the space like digital imaging errors. The line between projected settings and active, character-associated puppets blurs. In only a few instances is there a direct association between the dance and projections. The role of the images is fluid.
This fluidity may make it difficult to fit BeginAgain comfortably into one’s idea of dance but the piece largely consists of movement, even when it is movement performed by light and shadows. No matter what it is that’s dancing and no matter that the occasional verbal language and the structure suggests drama, even that, in the final moments, there is even beautiful, irrefutable closure, it is dance.
If there is a fault in the piece it is in the length of some sequences, which make their point and repeat it till the movement approaches the meditative aspect of mantra. Repetition is assumed in the work’s title but to what end? Do we begin again in hopes of ending differently or is repetition the end in itself? That strong denouement incorporates both of these notions; that repetition is the norm, change is subtle and thus the end is the release in which we say goodnight.