The Joyce Theater, New York, NY.
November 8, 2025.
GALLIM, the interdisciplinary arts group and modern dance firm led by Andrea Miller, introduced an evening-length work at The Joyce Theater in November 2025. Within the firm’s newest work, MOTHER, Miller “confronts what she calls the ‘Apocalypse of Matter’: our rising distance from contact, pores and skin, and natural give up.” MOTHER is a journey of considerate whimsy and curious surrealism, dropped at life with an authentic rating by Frédéric Despierre.
Miller’s work has a particular high quality and aura to it, and this manufacturing carried these components all through. The stage had a easy backdrop with a putting black gash in its in any other case white continuity. It’s each a relaxed entity and one among energy and chance – something may come by way of that gash and burst onto the stage. Spoiler alert: nothing does. However what did come onto the stage was certainly profound and magnetizing. The instances I’ve seen GALLIM carry out have left me with the identical ideas…that I’m not sure I perceive what I used to be imagined to, and that it in all probability doesn’t matter.
The factor about dance is that it touches us in methods phrases can not. We really feel issues we will’t describe. On this work, that concept stored coming again to me – the actual fact I felt one thing, and the (unlucky, as a reviewer) proven fact that I struggled to search out the phrases to convey these emotions. I felt a way of delivery, the battle of it, and the thriller of it. I felt the tensions between the dancers as a lot as I felt the unity and circulation between them. Motion-wise, the dancers employed each ballet strains and deeply intuitive noodling, the mixture of which was pleasing to witness.
Costumes (Orly Anan) accentuated this sense, unitards or leotards with mesh, revealing type with out nudity, and in varied levels because the lighting modified. At one level, a big creature joined the forged of slithering types – an all-white being, wearing fringe from head to toe. Think about an excessively excited snowman dressing up as a flapper for Halloween, however that additionally is perhaps a ghost? On this story, the snowman/flapper/ghost began off as pleasant however grew to become extra sophisticated because the piece progressed. Not not like life.
The humanity of MOTHER is that we’re all creators of one thing. The dancers onstage didn’t embody conventional roles on a regular basis (though typically), however did embody the sense that they had been each a bunch and in addition people at completely different factors. Pushed by the trance-inducing rating of Despierre, the work attracts within the viewers in ways in which transcend language. Regardless that I’d have loved a bit extra punctuation of sound or motion to interrupt up among the trance-like qualities, journeying to this world of esoteric creation was a pleasing journey.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
