Hold Me Together

Only a writer of haiku should review the spare pieces that the maverick Nancy Zendora has been making since the late 1970s. In the glow of the Joyce Soho, you contemplate them as you would a flower arrangement that alters subtly. Yet they are ineluctably human. In The Voice of Light, Zendora enters a dim zone marked by a small illuminated pyramid. Against silence and intermittent sounds—a bird, a shakuhachi, the sea—she pits a harsh, dry scream. Inhales it. Her few simple actions grow large in the emptiness.

photo: Richard Termine

Casel in the air: Stephen Petronio Company at the Joyce

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More About

• Stephen Petronio
• Nancy Zendora
• Nagisa Shirai
• Juan Merchan
• Igor Fyodorovitch Stravinsky

Places of Dark Writing/2 Dreams: Marie Baker-Lee and Juan Merchan, in ingeniously constructed black clothes, seem to listen to the space and each other. Lean and bearded, Merchan looks like an El Greco; lizard-like he cocks his head. Occasionally they touch, but more often you feel their souls pulling at one another. Sensitively, intimately, as if aware of small, fresh wounds. In Stone Piece, five dancers enter with rocks on their heads, and how they use them or consider others' becomes a matter of unspoken questions and suspicions. In both these works, every movement and change of mood blooms surprisingly, memorably—the way the plucked strings of Sang-Won Park's kayagumsplit the air.