Get Out Tonight: Kidd Pivot @ OtB

Lost Action, the dance piece from B.C.-based choreographer Crystal Pite and her troupe Kidd Pivot (through tonight at On the Boards, 8 p.m., $18/$12 25 and under), is a powerful exploration of the living body and its capacity for communicating (or perhaps just capturing) the extremes of human emotion.

Watching it, we were reminded of Friedrich Nietzsche's theory of "eternal recurrence," the idea that if every moment of our lives didn't occur once, but rather was infinitely repeated, each moment would take on a far greater weight and significance. In Lost Action, Pite uses repetition much to this effect: By forcing the audience to watch (and re-watch) the physical response to an event, the audience not only focuses on the body's dramatic capacity for expression, but also, through this, to contemplate the living body itself.

One segment, near the middle of the 90-minute performance, stands out in our mind. A dancer lies down on the stage as though dead; a woman approaches and cradles the body; around her, three other men stare. The dance is not narrative, per se, but its emotional power is anchored to such images. From this point, the dancers move fluidly through a series of tableaux, each a more and more abstract representation of the response to death. One man grabs the woman and drags her off the body. The others lift the corpse up, bearing it in greater and greater emotional anguish. The choreography becomes circular; the tableaux cycle back to leave the dancers in their initial positions, and the segment repeats.

The above is simply one of a number of dramatic and moving bits to a complex work, presented by a crew of extremely talented dancers and a choreographer who mixes both intellect and emotion to create a powerful work.

Photo of Lost Action courtesy of On the Boards & Kidd Pivot.