Noémie Lafrance, Melanie Maar, and Keith Hennessy Inscribe the Body

A A A Comments By Deborah Jowitt Wednesday, Apr 8 2009

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Poppy De Villeneuve

Noémie Lafrance and spectators in "Home."

Yi-Chun Wu

Keith Hennessy in "Crotch. . ."

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Sens/No�mie Lafrance
For location, go to: www.senproduction.org
718-302-5024
Through Sunday, April 11

Melanie Maar Keith Hennessy/Zero Performance
Dance Theater Workshop
April 2 through 4

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Maar sings in German—softly at first, then louder. When she begins to dance, Nagai comes close to her, lashing his equipment cables out of his way, jazzing his body around. Maar gives us a fine-tuned display of unusual, patiently effortful movements—repeatedly dropping into a squat and bouncing up again the way Lopez did, forming her hands into birds’ heads that peck the air and her body, trying to balance on one bent leg with the other locked behind it, standing with one foot clubbed.

In the final sequence, the three women perform a phrase that, repeated many times, gets them across the stage in increments. It’s strangely elegant, despite its awkward edge and lack of efficacy. Eventually they return to their starting point with big, heavy skips and begin to alternate those with increasingly athletic runs. You want to cheer for them. Nagai plays on an acoustic guitar that sounds almost like flamenco, but he sings in Japanese, and it’s he who brings the piece to a close after the women return to swirling their arms and fingers. He exits singing, and we can hear his voice getting fainter and fainter in the bowels of the building.

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