Review: Brujx at NYU's Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.

I am sure that luciana achugar (no questions right now) is a brainy choreographer and must be light years ahead of me in her knowledge of Marxist philosophy and literature. At least, I'm assuming she is, because her new piece, Brujx, for the Karl Marx Festival, ON YOUR MARX, had me thinking about what you think about when there's really nothing to think about.

Or should I say when you get the gist of a piece in 37 seconds, and it runs longer than 90 minutes.

The program states: "In this historical moment that feels primed for revolutionary action, Marx's works are potentially all the more urgent. These performers enact Marxist ideals through the lenses of queer, postcolonial, feminist, and anti-racist praxis, bringing Marx to the 21st century."

There were a number of essays in the program by distinguished professors and, to tell you the truth, I couldn't understand one word, since they were written in academese. Just to verify this claim, I asked friends to read the essays, and they didn't understand them either.

luciana achugar-that's correct, she doesn't use any capitalization--a Brooklyn-based choreographer from Uruguay, has been the recipient of two Bessie awards-which, by the way, should have been the blast of the fall dance season and turned out to be a turgid, draggy affair (whatever happened to fun downtown?)-a 2017 Alpert Award recipient, a Guggenheim Fellow, and a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grantee.

It all sounds great, but...

I knew that I was in for trouble since the program was late in starting and then Ms. achugar-at least I think that it was her-appeared on the staircase and started explaining to us that we had to enter through the rear of the stage, and then we could go out into the auditorium, and then we could enter through the back of the stage, and then we could become part of the theatrical dialogue, and then we could join in, and then...

I was getting very irritated.

I was smart. I waited until everyone was inside and then I begged an usher if he would just let me enter through the back of the auditorium, which he did. And what greeted my eye: downstage, three women bent over, the cracks in their rear ends upright and visible to all.

I knew this was not going to be funny because you could feel the seriousness all around.

And this being a Karl Marx Festival, it was going to be about subjugation, and freedom, and rights, and overcoming barriers.

It started. The cracks in the behinds still visible. The women moved up, moved down, they swayed their bodies, they sweated, they moved upstage on the pairs of pants they used as mats. Yes, I understand. Men are a source of disgust and over empowerment. And they sweated. (I have to say that I wanted to give them water.) Then two of them came out into the auditorium and crawled over people and chairs, only to return to the stage. (OK, women have to return to the source of their frustration.) Then they took off the sweaty pants and beat them against the wall. (So much meaning-let's take out the men and shoot them.) A cowbell rang. Then someone slipped them a bottle of water, they all started pounding against the back wall, and finally two of them took off their upper bra like costumes, revealing their breasts. (I guess I needed someone from a D.C. think tank to explain this all to me.) Then they all danced together for another frustrating 15 minutes in what seemed like an Isadora love-in. A cowbell rang. It never relented. Then when it was obvious that it was over, the audience responded with bravos.

I wonder if they would have done the same if the choreographer had been a man?

I felt numb. I tried to analyze. What had I seen?

A choreographer's need to engage an audience in what was, it seemed, a self-congratulating orgy of disillusionment and hostility to the world. Yes, corruption, violence, subjugation of the worker, women squashed like insects,--awful. But it need not be boring.

Don't you think Jerome Robbins, if he were still with us, would have screamed?

I was waiting for the end to include more program notes about the work: "Brujx, a world premiere, ritualizes the labor of the dancers, exposing and transcending it to unearth the powerful and primal magic brujx within them. As in all of achugar's work it proposes DANCE as the necessary transformational healing for our time. Brujx resists western assumptions of beauty and hierarchical order, freeing the dancers both of their role as worker in the power structure within the creative project and of the universal shame of being animal-sexual-powerful-instinctive creatures."

So that's what it was about in almost two hours' running time?

Photograph: Ian Douglas.

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