Dance
Wrestling Dostoyevsky: Betontac
The European Dream Festival was a welcome hiccup to New York City’s circadian rhythm. Twenty-three of our city’s prime cultural venues played host to cutting-edge work from twenty-three European countries. Betontac’s Wrestling Dostoyevsky, presented by Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church, was a prime example of why this festival is a dream come true.
Betontanc perform Wrestling Dostoyevsky for the Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church. Photo by Primoz Bizjak.Betontac (Slovenian for Concrete Dance) was founded in 1990 by Matjaz Pograjc amid the country’s growing revolution and subsequent independence from Yugoslavia. To say that this company, like much of the dance-theater creeping out of Central Europe, is infused with a war-torn sensibility for haunting imagery would be an understatement. They exude a brooding visual poetry that American theater can only ever imitate, and imitate badly. So for Betontac, Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment is a doomsday-marriage made in heaven.
Over a dozen lamps shrouded in vintage blouses warm the atmosphere for a cast of six wiry and compelling performers to sweep across a crest of sepia-toned paranoia. A tale of megolomania, murder, and guilt are seamlessly woven into the fabric of the performers’ bodies. While Crime and Punishment as a literary event is an excavation into psychological depths, Betontac treats this work as a purely kinesthetic phenomenon. Dostoyevsky’s beautiful prose lives in their bones and musculature more than their minds, and quite surprisingly the English translation lives proficiently in their mouths as well. Yet the strength of the piece is the company’s commitment to action. Their physicality has the gritty taste of apocalypse. Branco Jordan and Primoz Bezjak engage in a violent testosterone-fueled duet that pit the performers somewhere between a feuding bout of contact improv and a schoolyard brawl: hands clutching face, fingers yanking hair, bodies careening to the floor and rebounding at a hundred miles an hour.
The show goes limp, though, when it employs overused theatrical motifs: a lyrical rape-scene, pop-inspired group numbers, and a sequence where the performers run around the stage aimlessly as if they were lost. However, these sufferings are counter-balanced by the troupe’s interspersed, if awkward, audience interactions. They beckon us to act as lighting operators. They treat us to fresh gingerbread cookies. They plead for donations with an outstretched hat and puppy-dog eyes, much of the audience obliging with dollar bills and coins (the money would not be returned).
The piece ends with the audience turning off the lamplights, a performer softly utters, “Please. Thank you. Please. Thank you.” Yet despite these niceties, Betontac pile-drives its way through Dostoyevsky’s text with a production that is anything but well mannered.
Mathew Sandoval is a performance writer, practicioner, and philosopher; he is also a graduate student at NYU.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
The Unseen Saul Leiter
By Paul G. MaziarFEB 2023 | Art Books
These hitherto unpublished color slides show hidden angles and hushed moments amid the tumult of the city. The New York City streets through Leiter’s lens reveal the sides of lives that are seen when people don’t think they’re being listened to or watched, perhaps when they’re most themselves.
Omar Ba with Emann Odufu
DEC 22–JAN 23 | Art
Contemporary Senegalese artist Omar Ba has made a mark on the art world in Africa and Europe, and now he is doing the same in the US. Ba spent 2020 in New York City, and that pandemic experience became his crash course in American culture. During this time the artist came to see similarities amongst the issues that affect people back in his home of Dakar, Senegal and in the United States. This became the impetus for his exhibition at Galerie Templon in New York, Right of Soil – Right to Dream, and his US museum debut at the Baltimore Museum of Art, Political Animals.
Robert Motherwell and David Smith: Paper Trails
By Jennifer FieldFEB 2023 | Critics Page
The three artists exchanged letters across long geographic distances, with Smith chiefly writing from his home in Bolton Landing in the Adirondack Mountains, and Motherwell and Frankenthaler writing to Smith from their homes in Provincetown and New York City or while on international vacations. Yet the letters tell only a partial story: The artists’ drawings, paintings, and sculptures reveal a largely non-verbal and, arguably, more intimate dialogue.
On Anthony Julian Tamburri
By Samuele F.S. PardiniDEC 22–JAN 23 | Books
The two books that I have in front of me are at once similar and quite different. What makes them similar is their Italian American context and the semiotic approach that the author, veteran student of the Italian American experience and Dean of the John D. Calandra Italian American Institute in New York City, Anthony Julian Tamburri, employs.
