NEXT GENERATION PROJECT
The little we hear of this story makes it sound about as silly and misguided as stories get. In fact the whole piece seems an abortion from beginning to end, as the disaffected dancers suffer accidents–a stepped-on finger–and bruised egos with no dignity whatsoever, interrupting the dance constantly to complain. Text, movement, and music all work at cross-purposes, until finally a dancer plants herself in front of the audience and starts a long, elaborate math and word problem, insisting that we focus on what she’s saying; behind her the other five cavort and swing and sweep wildly. The split in attention this produces is nothing short of remarkable: the rational part of your mind is doing math while some other part of your brain pays attention to the dance–and feels the wildness of the movement better because it’s on the periphery of vision.
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Most upsetting about Bodies is that the sexual expression we do see is infantile, adolescent, or truncated. Early on Chao stuffs her fist in her mouth and chews on it; later the other two insert the fingers of both hands into Chao’s mouth for her. All three lie behind their briefcases, which they’ve opened and upended to form a kind of screen, and after removing their white dress shirts talk to each other about Marky Mark, about what each would like to do with him on a date. While talking they squirm with excitement, but the half-naked bodies lying next to them might as well be chopped liver. On a crowded el one commuter (Hudak) brushes the hair of another (Chao) away, then suddenly focuses on the other woman as an erotic object, stroking her hair and neck and massaging her shoulders. This episode ends as abruptly as it began: Hudak simply walks away, and Chao remains in a rhapsodic trance, listening to her Walkman with eyes closed.
