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Emily DickinsongS

nytheatre.com review by Martin Denton
August 15, 2005

The brAdS Company comes to FringeNYC from Prato, Italy to present their 30-minute dance theatre work Emily DickinsongS. This by itself should be enough to make you excited to see their show: the "International" in the New York International Fringe Festival gets taken for granted all too often, I think. But it's one of the truly invaluable aspects of FringeNYC, allowing a cross-cultural sharing that begins with performance and ends, if things go the way they should, with discussions afterward and at the formal public forums of FringeU and the informal ones at FringeCLUB and elsewhere.Regular readers of nytheatre.com know that dance is not my "beat"; I just don't have the vocabulary to adequately conjure this kind of theatre in print. But I'm glad to have seen Emily DickinsongS and I will give it my best shot.It is, as the title suggests, a work wrapped up in the poetical wanderings of the great American writer Emily Dickinson. Fragments of her verse are heard (or nearly heard) among the electronic/international music, Italian dialogue, and deliberate noise that serve as the show's soundtrack. But her persona is invoked visually more than aurally here; what I finally decided about Emily DickinsongS, with its disturbing and brutal choreographed depictions of rape and abuse and its dark evocations of bitter lonely spaces, is that it's a journey through the terrors of this insular poet's imagination—a nightmarish vision of the ugly side of humanity that Dickinson shut herself off from.Much of the show, which is directed by Monica Bucciantini and performed by a company of seven that includes Giulia Bini, Giulia Mannelli, Carlo Marsili, Lisa Santi, Armando Tarantino, Giovanni Villari, and Buccantini herself, happens in the dimmest of light, leaving us to view the action in silhouette; occasional flashes of very bright light punctuate the twilight. (Lighting and sound are by Michele Ciappi.)After an initial segment in which the company executes disparate, almost anarchic movements all around the space, come three danced almost-narratives. The first depicts an assault on a lonely, delicate woman; the second is a night out at the movies; and the third is what I took to be a kind of revenge fantasy featuring the dancer from the first piece. In between there's an eye-filling processional featuring the dancers alone and in various groupings, interacting with a seemingly endless film of silky white cloth.I couldn't assign literal meaning to most of what occurred here, which goes against my grain; and I can't say that I found it beautiful. But the images have proven resilient and memorable, and the feelings they inspired at the performance and thereafter really do jive with what the company says about its work in the program: "it's the violence that turns us into our own sacrificial victims."FringeNYC is about, above all else, stretching ourselves as theatregoers and artists to experience something unique and enlarging. Emily DickinsongS epitomizes this ideal. Don't get bogged down in the familiar: welcome these visitors from Italy with open arms and heart.