GIBNEY COMPANY

For their spring lineup at the Joyce Theater, Gibney Company brings three premieres to the stage. With curtains already drawn, dancer Madi Tanguay enters delivering a cheeky pre-show speech, teasing her future appearance in the opening duet.

Graham Feeny and Zack Sommer stroll in from upstage to kick off Roy Assaf’s A Couple, marrying pedestrian movement with dance, and examining how we exist with others. After an explosive introduction, Graham exits. Zack takes the mic, explaining a crossover:“I’m here” comes from stage left, and the two launch back into charged and articulated
sequences.

Zack slaps Graham mid-piece, a jolt of light freezing the moment before warmth returns, and the two diverge into their own personified vocabularies: Graham with sculpted movement, and Zack nodding to vogue dance culture. A visceral shift occurs as Graham gently places his hands on Zack’s hips. Zack closes his eyes, maintaining blind trust throughout the phrasework, despite an evolving lighting plot emulating fast-forwarded time. The piece ends with a rolling embrace around the stage perimeter, Zack rising, leaving, and the lights fading with him.

Peter Chu’s Echoes of Sole and Animal transports the audience into an entirely new world, inspired by the spirit of animals. In brown sheer mesh, velvet, and a motif of wearing leather shoes on their hands, dancers emerge in varied groupings. Through tenacious, unpredictable initiations alongside audio and light shaping, Chu has developed a movement and performance language for evoking the animal within a
human body.

A duet metamorphosizes into a shifting group, dancers highlighted and pulled into different rhythms at any moment. The body isn’t particularly guided by specific cues- there’s a raw internal experience unfolding, the way Chu has crafted it. Throughout, a feedback mic picks up footsteps and vocalizations, culminating in whispering echoes as hand-shoes walk across a spine, melting him into the floor, each step dimming the lights.

Another intermission serves as a palette cleanser, stressing the range and capability of the company’s style. Closing with Lucinda Child’s Three Dances (Prepared Piano) John Cage, dancers in gray sets appear in two lines against exposed brick. With minimalistic postmodern phrases and extreme patterning, repetition and canons create a déjà vu effect that, with Cage’s dynamic score, emphasizes rhythmic and technical intensity.

Spotlighted duets break up the group, followed by a section where, from a clump, dancers move side to side in pairs, until peeling away, and catching themselves in a lunge. Some peel back in, leaving others out in the open to perform. With no dramatic endings, transitions unfold under soft work lights. Child’s dedication to minimalism to emphasize the athleticism of the movement is a success; the company of eight glowed as the audience rose in support.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Emma Morris