Xsight! Performance Group
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Obviously there are people who miss Tim more. Like the members of the company he helped form in 1988, Xsight! Performance Group, and particularly his partner of 12 years, Brian Jeffery, now Xsight!’s artistic director. It was impossible to see this concert of five works outside the context of Tim’s death, on October 10. AIDS deaths have inspired many people in dance, from Joffrey choreographer Edward Stierle (who died in 1991 at the age of 23) to modern choreographers like Ralph Lemon and Bill T. Jones. And though artists in many other fields have been affected by and have confronted AIDS, I think of dance as suited to the subject of death generally.
Dancers are mystics deeply rooted in the physical world: dance is shot through with the urgent importance of bone and muscle, of youth and vigor. And maybe because dancers depend so absolutely on the body, they’re hyperaware of its transience–that ultimately it’s a tool, a means to spiritual and emotional ends. Dancers crystallize the sense ordinary people have every day, if they stop to feel it, of their own mortality.
Yet Wait’ll It Happens to You is also a bit of a mess, episodic and seemingly unfinished: it ends abruptly. Perhaps it’s a sketch for the sort of long piece Xsight! was once so good at sustaining. It’s too early to say whether a new company can rise from the old, but this concert made it seem that the elements are there: Jeffery’s talent for impassioned movement, Kim’s gift for striking images, Carpenter’s charismatic presence and ironic, teasing texts (not used here but in his own concert a few weeks ago). No one can replace Tim, and no one wants this Xsight! to be a carbon copy of the old one. But some controlling intelligence is needed, some chemistry among the members, for this group to produce the unified, wide-ranging work of a true collaborative organization.
