Four Minus Two
John Jasperse is the downtown boy who made good. There are other experimental choreographers from his generation (he is 39 years old) who have won prestigious European awards, taken over the stage at BAM or created work for Baryshnikovs now-defunct postmodern dance troupe, the White Oak Dance Project. No one else, however, has done all of these things. For most of the seven years that his star has been rising, Jasperse has worked with the same three dancers: Miguel Gutierrez, Parker Lutz and Juliette Mapp. Last year, Lutz and Gutierrez left the company. Jasperse did not replace them. With just two dancers, the riveting Mapp and himself, he does not try to duplicate the roving, familial dynamic of the foursome. He makes a dance precisely for two.
The dance begins with an ambiguous handshake. Jasperse and Mapp stroke the vulnerable pale undersides of each others arms until they reach the hands, which click together and lock. just two dancers turns the typical structure of a Jasperse dance inside out. Instead of small tasks (folding newspapers, balancing on blocks, jiggling ones boobs or flaccid balls and cock) building inexorably to a larger meaning, there is one huge task, if you can even call it that, that transforms everything it touches: the task of being with another. From the get-go, you know it will involve tenderness and entrapment.
For most of the piece, Mapp and Jasperse move between variously sized white platforms spread across and up and down the steeply raked auditorium. At first, the dancers keep to separate platforms, as far away from each other as possible. The distance between them only intensifies their mutual grip: They reflect each others every eloquent stiff-armed move. Appropriately, the audience has been supplied with hand mirrors. When one dancer is behind you and the other in front, the mirror enables you to see both at once. Of course, to see them both, you have to reduce one to a reflection. Perhaps the dancers are doing something similar to each other, or maybe they lead and follow at the same time. The mystery is delicious.
When they have exhausted all the possibilities of mirroring, Mapp and Jasperse move on to a new game and exhaust that. They jump up and down to the Beastie Boys "Sabotage" long enough to make us giddy. They taunt each other with strangers, sliding off their white islands into a sea of spectators, where they splash about happily and cruelly. Jasperse works himself into a frenzy of frustration, while Mapp lies languorously on her back, as if readying herself for a nap. Jasperse scrunches the statuesque Mapp in his arms, lays the bundle of her on the floor to crush beneath his weight and, in a final futile attempt to wring some warmth out of her, rests her limp foot on his cheek. Their relationship is always moving, but not necessarily forward.
Likewise, the dance ebbs and flows. It is by turns sexy, tragic, hilarious and embarrassing. Occasionally it is unreachable. just two dancers disappears into impenetrable depths whenever the dancers lose track of each other and perform only for us, or for no one.
In the 60s and 70s, choreographers thought methodically about the folly of trying to represent the unrepresentable–the self. They created the "task-based performance," in which "perform" was a transitive verb. Dancers didnt perform, they performed actions, thus sparing everyone a spectacle of ego. The dances were honest, solid and emotionally flat. Jasperses generation doesnt want to be false, but they dont want to be even-keeled all the time, either. (In fact, lately they want to be deranged–the dance of extremity is extremely popular at the moment.) Until now, Jasperse has resolved this dilemma by sticking to unremarkable movement "tasks" but patterning them with such obsessive logic that they end up accumulating great emotional force.
With just two dancers, the task itself is vexed. It is immaterial, a state of mind. This is a brave departure for Jasperse and, like most bravery, risks being foolish. When the dancers hold their ineffable task firmly between them, we are likely to be moved. When they dont, its not easy to see what theyre up to, no matter how we position our mirrors.
just two dancers at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 W. 19th St. (betw. 7th and 8th Aves.), 212-924-0077.