LOVE ALONE ANTHOLOGY PROJECT

It is difficult to put into words the emotional weight of Love Alone Anthology Project, choreographed by Keith A. Thompson and performed by DanceTactics at the La MaMa Moves! Dance Festival 2025.. Inspired by Paul Monette’s elegies for his partner lost to AIDS, the work pulls from multiple disciplines, with performers of multiple generations to create a raw, living tribute to grief, love, and resilience.

The performance opens with a stark image: a lone chair and table onstage, soon joined by two young men moving through the first inspiration in the evening’s dialogue: Monette’s poemGardenias. The two tossed movement and dialogue between one another, sharing each respective weight and boundary of expression. A conversation transcending the limitation of one form.

Movement, spoken word, visual projections, and photography ripple together throughout the 65-minute work, blending seamlessly with Monette’s stream-of-consciousness poetry. As episodes unfold, each one offers a different light of devotion — sometimes a charged duet, sometimes a solo slipping into and out of the light.

Following the opening duet, a soloist deconstructs the table to synthesized rhythms. The space is reimagined, cleared. All the while, a collage is projecting onto the wall behind, like quickly flipping through a magazine of images. Images of the writing, of performers bodies, of captured light, graphic design and visual artistry spill across the screen asperformers inhabit the stage space.

Brother of the Mount of Olives, an episode of the evening, is a trio. There are tradeoffs between duets and solos, as well as incredibly grounded sequences of partnering, the dancers moving as one organism,
bodies folding into each other under the electric pinks and blues; moments of aching tenderness where
a glance or a hand on the back told whole stories, all while images are still flashing from behind. A basket is
pulled from stage left, bringing orange light into the space. The movers dance delicately between
colors and emotions. This was not however simply a string of dances, or monologues, or visual designs; it was a full
embodiment of feeling.

Following the energetic trio, Clarence Brooks pulls up a chair, into a square box of white light downstage right,
and reads aloud directly from Monette’s Love Alone: 18 Elegies for Rog, while a solo dancer moves behind him.
This solo embodies each cherished word. In a discussion post-show, Brooks described the care that went into understanding each word that came out of his mouth. Taking months to dissect and articulate, to fully
understand the intention of each one of Monette’s precisely decided words.

Every element — the volume and texture of the voice, the speed and risk of the movement, the exposure of the body — revealed the performers’ deep personal engagement with the text. These were not just retellings of Monette’s grief; they became new love stories of their own, breathing with the authenticity, experience, and dedication of the dancers and their own stories.

Half Life, a piece bathed in green light, takes place while the monologue guides simultaneous articulated movement, or is it the other way around? It is charged with the harshness of reality’s injustice, bearing the weight of what ifs. And then a fluid duet, with both rich recorded and live
vocals fills the stage.

Here/No Goodbyes is a white button down and white briefs duet performed by the opening duetters. In this episode there is a profound range of emotions. Discussions of the end, lifting of each other’s bodies over their shoulders, screams of anger, grief, disbelief, harshness, softness, love, hate, eb and flow, like life.

It takes rare artistry to transform a feeling into music, love into words, poetry into movement, memory into presence. The Love Alone Anthology Project serves this transformation not by just articulating it, but by offering it fully — layered, complex, human, and profoundly moving.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Emma Morris