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Inside Out

"Autopsy"
Choreography by Ashleigh Leite
Joyce Soho
New York City
March 11, 2006

by Nancy Dalva
copyright 2006 by Nancy Dalva

"How to keep the flight of mind yet be exact."
Virginia Woolf

Ashleigh Leite's intense quintet called "Autopsy" marvelously establishes her as a choreographer to be seen, and seen again—for herself in performance, for what she gives her dancers and how she allows them to make themselves seen and known, and for her original mind. Hers is as visceral a dance art as you would expect from a former assistant and rehearsal director of the Stephen Petronio Company, and she is the same gorgeous dish he anatomized—and set loose!—in his "City of Twist." She's silky, she's beautiful, she's hot; yet here's what she is not: superficial, self-conscious, or self-involved. While it's true that her journey in this work is from the interior, she takes a novelist's eye to her material, spinning it out on her company of four, so that you can get to know them severally, and separately.

A little like a sorority, then, these five women—Leite and Gina Bashour, LoMa Familar, Meredith McCanse, and Sandy Tillet—but it's up to you to decide what binds them other than a certain fleshly realness. Dancing first in grey or black shirts and underpants, they are singular presences. Like any four women, rather than any four dancers—at least that's the illusion they offer, since they are in fact accomplished dancer-performers.

What seems to happen in this piece is a waking from disaster. There is a prologue we do not know, and the thrust of the work is to unpack whatever baggage brought the participants to this unstill point. We meet the women as they meet each other, in a place that seems to me to be a holding pen, a waiting room, a purgatory. They are each and every one discovering what this place might be and who their fellow travelers are, just as we are trying, at the same time, to know the same things. The work progresses in solos and duets and so forth, the women in various combinations, dancing sometimes with tenderness, sometimes with alienation, sometimes with visceral protest, and then, at the end with resolution and transcendence. The vocabulary is very like Petronio's, as is the technique, but with a feminine and unironic inflection and weight.

In the process of dancing, the five survivors—for this is how I see them, which might be me wearing Petronio spectacles—seem to get to know each other, and to get ready to leave this strange room in which they find themselves, as the drowned might discover that, underneath the sea, they can swim like mermaids. They carom and cantilever off each other, absorb each other, deflect each other, abandon each other for the comfort of the hard floor, only to rise up and give themselves over to kinesthetic abandon. The work builds to a solo for the choreographer, and it is a mark of her capacity for true structure that, without any overt narrative, you understand the content of her solo because of the group passages that have preceded it. Like cognac after wine. She travels, in her solo, the same journey all the women transit in "Autopsy."

The women change costume part way through the dance to ripped white shirts and plain panties, with the garments suggesting that the women themselves have suffered tears, some sort of shredding on the way to this place where everything is spotless, but not new. By this point I felt that each had some information she was trying to tell the others—who she was, where she had been, what awful something had happened to her. Or maybe, what something wonderful had been interrupted. In other words, I got the idea that these women were dead, and meeting in some ante-room from which they would only be released when they had danced out their stories, and heard each other, and then, as an ensemble, were ready to enter the next room. Heaven, perhaps, or judgement, or maybe just cycling back into life. This, though, was my feeling, my interior response to this passionately extrovert dance about inner life. Anyone else would have seen something else, and I suspect the choreographer's intentions might have been quite different. Or not. It doesn't matter, does it?

I found myself amazed by this dance, and I still am, as I revisit it to write about it. Whether it's diary, reportage, or work of fiction, I can't say. And maybe that is the point. Because, really, all three always acquire aspects of the concocted. Phrasing does that, selection does that, choice does that, elision does that. Willy nilly: narrative is a device, not a document. Writing always is in divine peril that way and so—no matter how real the bodies writhing in front of us—is choreography.

Volume 4, No. 12
March 27, 2006

copyright ©2006 Nancy Dalva
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last updated on March 27, 2006