CONSTRUCT A GUY AND THE LACE

New York Live Arts presented Tere O’Connor’s Construct-a-Guy and The Lace.
O’Connor treats choreography as a mode of thinking rather than a vehicle for narrative or musical structure. His dances resist depiction or translation; they don’t illustrate ideas so much as set them in motion. “My work can be seen as a choreographic reconstruction of a parrying, quicksilver body on the run. It doesn’t behave along lines of cogency or resolution,” O’Connor explains.

The evening opened with Construct-a-Guy, performed by Tim Bendernagel. Originally
choreographed and performed by O’Connor at New York Live Arts as part of Fresh Tracks (1984) the solo returns to its birthplace renewed. Bendernagel performed with sharp precision and a wry sense of humor, moving his behind in circles with a limp wrist before darting across the stage in quick jumps, arms and legs held erect. The work’s fractured physical logic and abrupt tonal shifts clearly establish the foundation of O’Connor’s choreographic language.

The Lace turned toward the closeted interiority of queer experience. “Throughout my early career, I transposed strategies for survival into tools of choreographic process. My work found its voice in the complex ordering of structural sequence, moving freely between pre-existing dance vocabularies and personal movement dialects,” O’Connor writes.

Bendernagel returned to the stage alongside Liony Garcia, Gabriel Bruno Eng Gonzalez, Natalie Green, Aaron Loux, and Heather Olson.The piece opened with Garcia center stage, the remaining dancers split into two lines to his right and left, watching him.

Suddenly, in uniform, everyone began walking off in different directions. Later, the ensemble formed a factory line, standing in place as their hands and upper bodies snapped through short, spastic movements, as if collectively trying to manufacture
something. This motion accelerated until Gonzalez fainted, caught by another dancer. His collapse rippled down the line, bodies tipping and falling into one another.

Together, Construct-a-Guy and The Lace reaffirm O’Connor’s refusal of coherence as an
endpoint, insisting instead on choreography as a living system shaped by instability, memory, and survival.

EYE ON THE ARTS, NY — Frankie Lehr
endpoint, insisting instead on choreography as a living system shaped by instability, memory,
and survival.