Debut work limbers up all the senses
‘The Way You Look’ probes perception with action, language, light
As the audience filed into San Francisco’s CounterPulse Thursday for the premiere of “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight,” dancer and choreographer Jess Curtis stood at the entry to the space and urged the public to take seats in the performance zone, promising more surprise and action than in the bleachers. Soon members of the audience were scattered in careful clusters over the whole of the dance floor, like a cast of characters installed by Duane Hanson, the superrealist sculptor.
“Good evening, Dr. Curtis,” a voice with a Scottish brogue began. And with this simple, courteous utterance, Claire Cunningham, who hails from Scotland, and Curtis, who splits his time between San Francisco and Germany, began a sometimes deeply poignant evening of inquiry into human perception and understanding. Movement, visuals, light and spoken language were their tools.
Cunningham, who is well under 5 feet in height and uses two forearm crutches to balance her body (she suffers from congenital osteoporosis), is a leading disabled dancer-choreographer. Curtis, who is a pioneering Bay Area performer, now 50, revealed that he has to dance around the arthritis in his hip.
Together they asked us to go for a ride down a path that, according to UC Berkeley philosopher of perception Alva Noë, the great Socrates himself would have applauded. That’s because the point of “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight” was to plunge us into awareness of what was happening by disrupting our habits of dance-watching and by questioning our definitions of dance itself.
Much of the evening’s charm had to do with the winning team of Curtis and Cunningham, who have been working together intermittently for years. Cunningham has a dry wit and an air of sweet-and-sour keenness, while Curtis radiates the sense of a large puppy hungry to sniff, taste, feel and question the world around him.
During their first experiment at Thursday’s premiere, the pair traveled along the narrow corridors between the on-stage viewers, their faces weirdly blank. The audience members in the performance area suddenly felt like zoo animals, seen but not apprehended by the two investigators whose minds, disconcertingly, appeared to be elsewhere.
Soon we were told the secret: They were engaging in an exercise of peripheral viewing. As they passed near us, their task was to always keep audience members at the edge of vision. Then it was our turn. The audience was instructed to see the movers only peripherally. Whenever we failed, we were to do a pushup as punishment (few did). While the task itself was reminiscent of the kind of experiments one did as a kid, I felt a surprising sense both of loss and of being hidden from the object of my viewing.
Cunningham then unpacked the game as she moved about, all in a seemingly casual way. We learned that peripheral viewing is known in disability studies as what the able-bodied so often do to the disabled: They look surreptitiously and partly erase the person viewed. The body being seen sideways experiences itself as invisible or neutralized, and for a woman with a disability, this means she’s often rendered sexless.
Curtis, while on crutches last year was repeatedly offered the bus seat assigned the elderly. In this gentle, personal and affecting way, performance moments let us plumb the often hidden experiences we have or cause others to have nearly every day.
Because of how chairs were arrayed, I spent much of the night viewing only fragments of the pairs’ bodies. No experience of them perching on audience members’ legs or performing a headstand was fully visible, but then the creators of “The Way You Look (at me) Tonight” intended it to be that way.
Even the clips of Rogers and Astaire dancing were fragmentary. Yet Noë, as talking head, urged us to celebrate all that we do see from our inevitably partial vantage points and to recognize that, when aspects are missing from our visual field, like the back of the apple that faces away from us, we still “see” them.
While this slightly toolong evening is not for those hoping to lose themselves in a parade of taut and leggy young bodies, it is a hot ticket for sensualist thinkers — an elusive gem, like the thin, gleaming iridescent shapes that hung above the stage area. Through video (Yoann Trellu), music (Matthias Herrmann), set design (Michiel Keuper) and lighting (Chris Copland), the team created an elegant environment that encouraged us to regard dance as an act of thinking together with others.