Joanna Kotze Builds a Dance of Loops at New York Live Arts

Joanna Kotze's new 55-minute work, “this is the beginning, this is the end,” runs through Nov. 14 at New York Live Arts, where Kotze holds this year's resident commissioned artist position. The New York Times has named it a Critic's Pick, describing it as “a high-strung evocation of cyclical turmoil.”

The dance starts mid-action. Dancers rush onstage and rearrange sections of metal fence around two musicians. The musicians — Maralie Armstrong-Rial and Ryan Seaton — agitate the space with electronic ticking and processed screams. The configuration barely settles before the lights blink a reset and everything moves again. Then it moves again.

How does the repetition work?

The piece is seldom stagnant, though it does repeat. With the fences framing the stage, Hsiao-Jou Tang stands in a rear corner like a gymnast beginning a floor routine. Her solo is long and eccentric. It soon ceases to be a solo.

Kotze joins Tang in the corner and begins the same routine, sharing her space. Lena Engelstein follows with her own iteration, then Symara Sarai. Canon repetition is a common choreographic device, but here the Times review credits two elements with enlivening it:

• variation — a dancer might leave the stage and return later in the sequence;
• the score and Kathy Kaufmann's lighting — sound periodically squeezes into silence, then returns with a boom, a blackout and a flush of color, jump-starting the dance.

In the work's second half, the full cast of six dancers forms something like a human paper shredder. A repeated sequence — stepping forward with arms front, pivoting, reversing to the rear — loops over and over. Each dancer starts in the opposite direction from their neighbors, so the group appears to advance frantically in both directions at once. The opposing moves do not cancel out. The roiling mass drifts, and when it hits a boundary it adapts, Blob-like, persisting along a different vector.

What does it mean politically?

Kotze has said in preshow interviews that the work concerns history repeating itself and the positive force of collective action versus the threat of conformity. Primed by those statements, the Times critic read the shredder sequence as “a visceral evocation of what the past 10 years of American politics have felt like — the continual, disorientating whiplash combined with the sense of being helplessly adrift.”

The reading is not forced on the audience. Kotze and her collaborating cast keep the political resonances mostly unfixed. The mass switches to new obsessive sequences. Individual dancers break off, spinning across the floor or scrambling up and down the raked audience seating. The group throws down the fences and pauses to look up at the sky. One by one, each dancer becomes still or nearly still, as if paralyzed.

What happens in the final song?

Armstrong-Rial and Seaton sing a harmonized phrase, adding a word with each repetition: “You,” “You can,” “You can let.” At the performance the critic attended, the phrase grew to “You can let all these years go” — a moment of relief — before expanding to “You can let all these years go unanswered.”

That extension cut the relief short. Was it, the review asks, “a siren voice of complacency, of capitulation, of quietism?” The question is left to the viewer. Whether the dance reads as depressing or hopeful, the critic writes, probably depends on how each spectator feels about the most recent turns in American politics.

The title supplies the last word on the loop: this is the end. This is the beginning.

Joanna Kotze's “this is the beginning, this is the end” runs through Nov. 14 at New York Live Arts (newyorklivearts.org).