Smooth Operators

New Action Theatre

Community Education Center, March 16-17



Togetherness: (left to right) New Action Theatre’s Kate Watson-Wallace and Gabrielle Sigal in Undone.

There is nothing "undone" about the multimedia dance of that name premiered by New Action Theatre as part of CEC’s New Edge Residency Program. New work can be — often should be — erratic, tentative. However, co-directors Gabrielle Sigal and Kate Watson-Wallace produced a theater piece that looked polished and smooth-edged.

With multimedia dance theater, there’s always the possibility that the multi will swamp the media, or that dance will get lost in theater. Wisely, Sigal and Watson-Wallace, both trained dancers, focus on their strong suit, choreography, finding four talented dancers to work with them. They skillfully interweave hazy, pastel-tone video images and a montage of recorded music, all discordant, percussive, effective. But basically this is a dance.

They’ve chosen an ambitious subject as well, voyeurism, which is sort of the Topic du Jour what with the clamor about reality TV and tabloid reporting. It’s also the theme of all art in one way or another, since art by its very nature is voyeuristic. Any way you look at it (sorry), it’s a layered topic.

The two women lead us into their theatrical maze with their bodies, which they know how to use and are worth watching. They create movements of generously outstretched arms and soft gestures that suddenly contract into sharp angles or end in falls. Sometimes the sharp edges turn aggressive, even mean.

The video camera shows us windows with fluttering curtains, then beyond to where a woman removes her blouse. On stage Watson-Wallace repeats this action while Sigal sits watching her on television by way of live video. This is the piece’s least effective section. We know the minute it starts exactly where it’s going. The watcher will become the watched. And she does. But then the video images shift mood from art house photography to something more like the nightly news: beatings, police, mobs. Personal intrusion transforms into something powerfully public. Violence moves across the video screen in patterns that echo the earlier billowing curtains.

So Undone ends just where the dancers bodies alerted us it would. The conclusion was there in the first steps they took, in the gentle rounded stretches and lilting leaps collapsed into brutal angles and violent gestures. The work has shape. Done.

—Janet Anderson