Contemporary Dance Company BodyVox’s Nine-Part Film Is Playful and Powerful

In the 3rd chapter of BodyVox’s 9-element dance film Figments, a group of unruly prospects brings chaos to a diner. Nonetheless when two of them leap on to a table and commence dancing, their waiter isn’t going to scold. He snatches the tablecloth out from under their feet when they leap into the air, a movement so graceful it is really as if he is relinquished control and joined their pas de deux.

You will practical experience a related perception of blissful surrender if you check out Figments, a reimagining of past BodyVox performances choreographed by creative administrators Jamey Hampton and Ashley Roland that debuted previous month as a travel-in motion picture at Zidell Yards. Instead than replicate our grim instant, the movie counters it with an ebullient blast of spectacle, goofiness and pleasure that leaves you in a point out of just about religious awe.

Hampton and Roland do not link the myriad parts of Figments utilizing a narrative or theme—they permit each individual dance to exist on its have conditions. “In the Backyard of Synesthesia” is surreal. “Failed to It Rain” is raucous. “Hopper’s Diner” is playful. “Deep Wading” is serene. “Urban Meadow” is buoyant. “Slipping for Grace” is passionate. “Figments” is ravishing. “Toy Boat” is dreamy. “Café Blanco” bristles with youthful vigor.

Hampton and Roland relish heading significant, but they trust their audience’s hunger for personal dances like “Synesthesia,” which opens the movie. At at the time smaller and smashing, the piece obscures the faces of the dancers, favoring mirrored images of extended limbs wrapped in Roland’s luxurious, multicolored costumes. Encountering “Synesthesia” is like staring by means of a kaleidoscope—you seldom know what specifically you’re observing, but you never want to look away.

If Figments were being a mere procession of great visuals, it could have grown wearying. Nevertheless there is rambunctious silliness in many of the dances, which include “Café Blanco,” which characteristics a symphony of rollicking scooter motion, and “City Meadow,” in which the dancers dress like sheep and shout, “Bah!” The exuberance of the performers generally would make you forget about you happen to be observing some of the most attained modern dancers in the earth, not the world’s biggest activity of make-believe that.

Figments grows somber for the duration of the lyrical “Slipping for Grace,” but the temper isn’t going to final. Hampton and Roland regularly consider the clearly show to euphoric heights, aided by both the dancers and their crew, specifically lighting designer James Mapes. When the dancers seem to remodel into choppy, levitating silhouettes that float in entrance of an orange backdrop, you commence to speculate the place the dancing leaves off and unique effects commence, but it will not subject. Every time Figments defies categorization, it provides a sublime significant.

When I interviewed Hampton and Roland last 12 months about their Halloween-themed film BloodyVox: Lockdown, Hampton turned down the label “present day dance.”

“We never contact it present day dancing because nothing at all is modern day anymore,” he defined.

There is no umbrella expression that could encompass all of BodyVox’s creations—not even “dance.” As substantially a movie as it is a dance film, Figments evokes the imagery of films as distinct as James Cameron’s Avatar and Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou (part of Mark Mothersbaugh’s zany Zissou rating is featured in the general performance).

Visual similarities aside, it doesn’t feel suitable evaluating Hampton and Roland to other filmmakers they’re screen visionaries in their own suitable. They show equivalent ease talking the languages of dance and film—particularly in the course of “Toy Boat,” in which Jillian St. Germain dangles from the ceiling in a half-sphere, elegantly contorting her human body to the beat of Yoko Ono’s tunes.

“Toy Boat” is made up of 1 of the most cinematic visuals in Figments: a gloriously wide shot of St. Germain hanging in the heavens. A lone woman in a bubble floating in the void could possibly seem like a ideal metaphor for everyday living all through COVID-19, but the pervading feeling is wonderment. You will not sense as even though you’re wanting at another person who is trapped. Like every person and all the things in Figments, she’s heading someplace.

SEE IT: Figments streams at bodyvox.com/overall performance/figments through March 11. $25.