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IMPRESSIONS: Tere O’Connor “Rivulets” at Baryshnikov Arts Center

IMPRESSIONS: Tere O’Connor “Rivulets” at Baryshnikov Arts Center
Sarah Cecilia Bukowski

By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
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Published on December 21, 2022
T.O' Connor's "Rivulets"; Photo: Maria Baranova

Co-comissioned by Baryshnikov Arts Center and Dance Space Project

Choreography: Tere O’Connor

Performers: Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Wendell Gray II, Emma Judkins, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Jordan Morley, Mac Twining, Jessie Young

Musical Score: Tere O’Connor

Lighting Design: Michael O’Connor

Costumes: Reid Bartelme

Producer: Sean Donovan

The movement material for this work was created in collaboration with the dancers.

Baryshnikov Arts Center, Howard Gilman Performance Space, November 7-17, 2022


Eight dancers, 

 

each a distinct universe,

draped in a mosaic of lush, cool tones and vibrant sheers

faces and bodies generous, capacious, and

gloriously

alive.

dancers in colorful clothes jump in unison but maintain seperate ways of being in space

Tere OConnor's Rivulets  L-R_ Emma Judkins, Jessie Young, Wendell Gray II, Mac Twining; Photo: Maria Baranova

 

They create and inhabit a world

(a facsimile of our own)

where order and chaos are relative terms

of no consequence to the whims and commands of their noble forms.

 

 

From an intricate, rippling mass

small images arise in fleeting unisons 

bubbling up as if by coincidence—

suddenly 

a reflection,

a kaleidoscope,

a hieroglyph,

a vortex,

just as suddenly dissolves.

 

 

Limbs flung to hang graphically in midair,

hungrily tracing the farthest edges

and the tightest lines inside.

Brief conversations emerge,

to exchange pleasantries

or intimacies

or maybe secrets.

Everything (and nothing) is a feature;

everything (and nothing) is an interlude.

 

man in golden sweaty and silky thin strapped unitards leads a pack of colorfully dressed dancers.They all stand on one leg with their other leg extedned to the side
Tere OConnor 's Rivulets,  Foreground: Wendell Gray II; Background L-R: Mac Twining, Jessie Young, Jordan Morley, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Tess Dworman; Photo: Maria Baranova

 

No single sound, no single image prevails,

yet it is somehow pure and whole.

It is a soundscape—atonal, melodic, acoustic, electronic, dissonant and harmonious.

It is a dancescape—formal, gestural, symmetrical, jumbled, bounded and bounding.

It is a lifescape continually created and destroyed.

 

 

Each dancer knows they are alone

just as they know they are together,

just as they know they are free,

as sure as their rivulets flow.

 


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