Singular Soloist Gives New Meaning to the Phrase "Dancing in the Dark"

In her eerie, compelling, program-length solo The Mirror, Danish dancer-choreographer Kitt Johnson crawls into the performing space in a faint beam of light to low sounds of menacing weather. Swathed in a dark cape, her head obliterated by its hood, she remains obstinately crouched, a grotesque creature of the underworld. Slowly her fingers emerge from her shroud, their tips like tiny, vicious claws, her hands engendering subtle anatomical horrors that she places where her face should be. Eventually she rises and opens the cloak to reveal a gorgeous black and white circus outfit—all sensuous folds and swellings. At intervals this costume (by Charlotte Ostergaard) unwinds into astonishing new forms, like fluid sculpture, as its wearer undergoes a metamorphosis through stages of witchery to heroic self-victimization. The primal, decadent power of the figure never lets you go. It is the dark side of ourselves that we know only too well.