BWW Reviews: Da-On Dance Presents THIRST at Danspace Project

Shadowy figures enter a darkened stage. A faint glow sneaking in from the staiNed Glass windows of St. Mark's Church barely defines their shoulders, heads, and stoic backs to the audience. There is stillness, and beams of light begin to spread from the lights in each of the figure's hands. They shape the indefinite dimness with rhythmic flashes toward the back of the stage. Then the light beams shudder and twitch, darting about the space unwarily and giving glimpses of that which is hidden under the cover the darkness.

As the stirring dissipates, an eerie green light creeps in from the far corner of the room. The eight members of Da-On Dance are revealed, frozen in their tracks, looking to each other for their next move. They begin to gesture with their hands moving up from their abdomens toward their necks. A sound score of unintelligible, recorded words and the warm, echoing tones of a single, auto-tuned cello, composed by Jerome Begin and performed along with cellist Loren Dempster, overlap until a mechanical, lingering drone takes over.

This is the framework for Artistic Director Jin Ju Song-Begin's THIRST, an evening length dance work that premiered at Danspace Project on September 26, 2013. THIRST uses the structure of Dante's Inferno to examine the role of suffering in the human experience. Throughout the work Song-Begin, costumed in layers of black, performs an on-going solo. The audience accompanies Begin-Song, like Virgil accompanies Dante, into the various realms of the underworld of the human experience.

Song-Begin uses the other seven dancers like figures in the third panel of Hieronymus Bosh's The Garden of Earthly Delights, arranging them in various moving hellscapes of suffering and angst. Ragged and limp, they stumble in from corner lined up like beggars for food. They hang their heads shamefully, arms outstretched. In a hysterical frenzy they throw themselves at one another, slapping skin together and lashing out in violent desperation. They are the souls being blown back and forth without rest. Arching away in agony, these dancers portray the agony of being swallowed by the monsters of guilt and greed. Abuse and betrayal are the undertones of every encounter, and humiliation haunts the space between their skin and their clothing.

While these people are chased and pummeled by old transgressions, Song-Begin's hell is a lonely place where she is left to suffer and see others suffering without control of their experience. Even as she grapples alone, she is pummeled by the music's incessantness. She pulls her shirt over her head to hide. She reaches for something and breaks away before she finds it. Her struggle escapes outward from its internal place of creation, fulfilling its self-inflicted destiny.

In the end, it is unclear whether these souls will find repose. If it is forgiveness they seek, perhaps the furious, sweat-spraying final scene that leaves the dancers' chests heaving and cheeks flushed is a kind of dance to the death. There is precipice from which we hang, as the dancers take their bow, left to wonder if the death is of suffering or in suffering.

THIRST was performed by Da-On dance September 26-28 at Danspace Project, St. Mark's Church,

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