With indoor stages darkened and audiences scattered to the virtual winds, the past 14 months of pandemic have sent performing artists in search of new ways to connect with the public — sparking some powerfully original work in the process.
Island dancer-choreographers Abby Bender and Jesse Jason, who first met the challenge with a beguiling outdoor multi-media extravaganza at the Martha’s Vineyard Museum last Halloween, have returned with another site-specific piece, ThRough, which began last weekend and has four remaining performances scheduled for the coming weekend in West Tisbury.
Ms. Bender and Ms. Jason collaborated with dancer, choreographer and filmmaker Lisa Gross to create the work, which mixes high aesthetics, low comedy, musical theatre and backyard games in a direct response to the spectrum of human experiences over the past year.
Isolation, boredom, paranoia, shame and dread have never been more engaging than in this show, presented as a series of vignettes that range from intimate monologues to antic motion.
Site-specific performance art is the show world’s 3-D chess, requiring an extra dimension of creativity to ensure the setting is more than simply a backdrop for performers. As seen Monday night under a nearly-full moon, ThRough easily passed this test with creative, sometimes startling approaches to the built and planted environment where the work is being presented.
A light in an upstairs window reveals a dancer’s passionate solo. A recorded voice leads the audience in a very peculiar circle. Perched in a tree, Ms. Jason suddenly scrambles down the trunk and headfirst through a window.
The three principal dancers appear sometimes as Fatelike figures, carrying mirrors, and at other times resemble comic tramps in an existential play. ThRough also makes compelling use of its small corps of five additional female performers, who summon in one scene the spirit of Matisse’s painting The Dance and in another, the inner chaos of pandemic life.
Dancing is the sublime center of the piece, but there are many other layers to enjoy.
Voices muse on life, age, safety and fear. Ms. Bender delivers a series of punning one-liners to a tree. Dancers inside and out, upstairs and down raise their voices in an original song by Roberta Kirn. A film by Ms. Gross superimposes news images from 2020 and 2021 over a somber dance by Ms. Jason and Ms. Bender, performed on an Island dirt road.
Running just under an hour in length, ThRough returns May 28 through May 31 at 8 p.m. Tickets are available at eventcreate.com/e/through. The program location and parking information are provided with purchase.
A note in the program suggests that Island audiences can look forward to more genre-expanding performances by Ms. Bender and Ms. Jason, announcing that the two are forming a collaborative with former Yard director of artist services Holly Jones under the umbrella of Ms. Bender’s Built on Stilts dance nonprofit.
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