Dance

Riding a wave of enthusiasm for spelling champions, Cristina Septien and her four-year-old South Pleasant Company have mounted a delicate piece of movement theater about a bee. With performances craftily spread over three weeks (it opened last Tuesday in an uptown cabaret space), To One I Saw Small is about things dance cannot really be about: wishes, fears, the past, the future. One of the leading characters never says a word and eventually disappears. Projections indicate the passage of time. Furniture rolls in and out on casters, and its placement carries symbolic weight.

Andrew Sloat

It means pretty: Diana Buirski

Details

To One I Saw Small
By Cristina Septien
Merce Cunningham Studio
55 Bethune Street
212.352.7112
July 22 through 30

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More About

• Cristina Septien
• Diana Buirski
• Chris Corporandy
• Amherst (Massachusetts)

Speller Ruthie (Diana Buirski), who ages from fourth grade to high school in under an hour, does a terrific job with a difficult role. Her father (Chris Corporandy) spends most of the show in a fugue state. The utter lack of irony in the writing and the playing may put hipsters off; To One ranges between charming and sentimental, betraying its New England roots (SPC originated in Amherst, Massachusetts). Too wordy to count as dance, too sober to register as "performance," it's a strange hybrid. Maybe its true audience is 'tweens.