BEBE MILLER & VINSON FRALEY 

Kyle Abraham took on a curatorial role for Danspace Project’s Platform 2024 with A Delicate Ritual a series of performances, talks, and classes honoring Abraham’s late mentor, Kevin Wynn.

To each participant, Abraham posed questions concerning nature, spirituality, and change. Additionally integral is a component of EX-change, manifested through inter- generational pairings of artists, the last of which being Bebe Miller and Vinson Fraley. An emerging choreographer with a formidable track record of performance credits, Pneuma is Fraley’s first creative effort at Danspace. Indifferent Forest finds Miller back to a familiar space, where she first showed work in 1981.

Miller begins making sure everyone in the room sees her copy of Katie Mack’s The End of Everything (Astrophysically Speaking). She shares an excerpt – how, in five billion years, the Sun is expected to die a dramatic death, expanding into a red giant, swallowing Mercury and Venus, and charring Earth to a crisp that will ultimately collide with the dying star. Something in Miller’s speech prompted her dancers to enter the space too early, which she calmly corrected without skipping a beat of her doomsday description.

The dance proper illustrates our capacity to comprehend such a cosmic forecast. We seem situated in some dystopian future of screens depicting (past)oral scenes, illuminating one potted tree. Miller, Angie Hauser, and Darrell Jones, in matching black dresses, go between behaving as celestial entities and bumbling humans coming to terms with their time running out, gravitating gracefully and staggering about, desperate to survive.

They become increasingly involved with objects in the space – a cushion, an uncooperative folding table, a piano – potential artifacts of our modern age for no new civilization to uncover. Like Mack’s foretelling of Earth’s atoms redistributing into space, each mover stumbles towards something, merging in stillness into glacial gliding. Over several rounds, friction erodes resistance into accepting our privilege to one day become stardust once more.

Fraley takes a different approach to eternity, flooding the sanctuary with haze. From a fetal ball on an astroturf runway, an embryonic cherub gestates in yogic postures that accentuate the white point on his scapulae. He is born fully formed as a gospel singing juggernaut as avatars of his corporeality waft in digital clouds. He mounts a glass pedestal, once to hang from a cross and again to ascend into heaven. Through text, song, and movement, Fraley embodies aspects of preachers, angels, and messiahs, only to evoke Narcissus.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Jonathan Matthews-Guzman