Three Guys

photo: Ellen Crane

Club feet: Wally Cardona (foreground) and Kathryn Sanders in Cardona's Trance Territory.

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More About

• Mark Dendy
• Joanna Kotze
• Timothy Bish
• Juliet Mapp
• Dance

The piece is all mystifying atmosphere and curious beauty. The four begin to thrash wearing bizarre scarlet face-covering helmets and dresses of woven red strips (by Jill Anderson); they change into black clothes, and finally into white ones. Sometimes they touch; occasionally two or more will huddle, clasped as if simultaneously embracing and sinking into the floor—although they do neither. Mostly, they're isolated in their own trances or numbly watching others. At one point, while Cardona stands at the back of the stage lashing his arms and torso around, tall, gorgeous Sanders stands at the front and slowly, almost creakingly, sinks into a deep plié and then sits staring at us. After a while she lies down; when he's finished, he comes and stands over her. But that dramatic moment, like so many others, doesn't lead to any connection between them. She rises and starts turning slowly; he takes over her spot and builds to wildness.

When, near the end, three of them dance along the green paths, Kotze repeats the same oddly lovely phrase again and again and again, as if time has ceased to have any meaning to her. She doesn't know she's tired until she's horizontal. But Trance Territory is no Rite of Spring. The ritual will happen again next Saturday night, and nothing will change.