Zoe|Juniper Explore A Crack in Everything

An common maxim about the arts is Walter Pater's quote that "All art constantly aspires to the condition of music." Behind this seemingly innocuous statement is a tacit understanding that music is the one art in which material and form are the same. The material of music is pure sound and its result, too, is pure sound.

What is missing from this constant aspiration of art toward music is the understanding that music, having separated itself from theater, dance and poetry at some point in history, has been seeking to reunite with them for the past two centuries. Wagner's use of the phrase Gesamtkunstwerk is well-known. What is less well-known is that his use of the term meant a unification of art by theater and not by music, and that its true purpose is to return the arts to Ancient Greece.

The latest zoe|juniper offering up at On the Boards is, a contemporary sort of Gesamtkunstwerk and, too, has a Greek theme at its core. Dancer Zoe Scofield and visual artist Juniper Shuey pursue a similar goal of uniting disparate arts in their Aeschylus-inspired dance work. But their ethos is completely different. Where the German Romantics sought a program of reinstituting Hellenistic ideals as a tonic to the creeping nihilism of their time, Ms. Scofield and Mr. Shuey follow in the contemporary trend of using whatever means are at hand to make a visual argument. When dance makes the point best, there is dance. Where recorded video makes the point best, there is recorded video. When graphic art makes the point best, there is graphic art. Anything that is useful is useful.

A Crack in Everything is a mysterious piece in many ways. The shifting interaction between recorded images which are always past tense by definition and the actions of the very present-tense dancers is elaborate, far more so than in similar pieces (Paige Barnes' recent War is Over comes to mind). Ms. Scofield and her dance partners play off this relationship throughout.

The stage is divided initially not only by depth and width but also by height. The curtain is lowered in such a way that it conceals most of the space of the theater, forcing the audience's attention to focus on a very narrow staging area in front of an opaque screen. As the dancers come slowly out with short, repetitive movements as in a ritual, brief images flash on the screen behind them, repeating and varying the action of the dancers in front. Then the opaque screen becomes quite transparent as lights flash behind and reveal still more dancers in the deep space of the stage.

At that point, no more than ten minutes in, the artists have set up a scenario is which space is constantly being redefined. Movements defy simply explanation as much as they defy expectation. But even beyond this, each space is tied to an area of time as well, though this too shifts fluidly throughout the evening. At one point, as if to make the movement lines quite explicit, a dancer at the fore of the stage draws with a marker the outline of her movement positions on a screen while others dance behind her. Then the lowered screen raises to become a sort of gallery installation while the sense of space expands in extraordinary fashion. By this point the audience should be ready for anything. This sense of space also extends into the music itself. Greg Haines' already subtle music on occasion stops completely while the dancers continue to space in this stop-time.

Ms. Scofield and Mr. Shuey use this constant dynamic of static and fluid, present and past, depth and breadth, sound and silence to create beautifully sensitive yet witty evocations of relationships through blood: blood by birth and blood by violence. It is far from a simple programmatic approach to Greek mythology. It is, as one would expect, a dance aspiring to the condition of music. The tools and ideas are contemporary; the theme is ancient indeed but no less powerful for that.