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Human Movement

Midway through “Frontera,” the dancers of Animals of Distinction, a multimedia dance company based out of Montreal, press their bodies into each other to form a line at the bottom of a large rectangle of blue light. Blocking the light with their backs, they form a human tunnel for the ends of the line to disappear through. Two by two, they slip, undetected by the monitoring light, under an archway of limbs and into the darkness upstage until only a single dancer is left. Their lone silhouette is captured before joining the others in “another world.”

Performance

Animals of Distinction: “Frontera” by Dana Gingras

Place

Next Wave Festival, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Brooklyn, NY, November 2024

Words

Candice Thompson

Animals of Distinction in “Frontera” by Dana Gingras. Photograph by Tony Turner

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In “Frontera,” director and choreographer Dana Gingras approaches themes of migration and displacement, and the ubiquitous surveillance of modern technology, with a tight structure resembling a palindrome.  

This fraught transition—which felt like the center of a sequence or the point at which the work folds in on itself—was one of several moments in this dance where Gingras’s highly physical choreography was perfectly matched to the lighting design by United Visual Artists. Their inventive collaboration set the conditions inside Brooklyn Academy of Music for a total throw down from both the dancers and the musicians of the band Fly Pan Am. 

The sounds of crickets, the ocean, and some fuzzy kind of feedback accompany the entrance of the dancers and what seems to be a walking score. Tracing the edges of the stage, the dancers follow each other, making sharp right turns. Eventually, there is congestion upstage as one woman reverses course, and bodies begin to pile up against her. Eventually the pressure forces one dancer to pop out of line. 

Meanwhile, snippets from field recordings by Dave Bryant play in a few languages. By the time it gets to someone speaking English, it is clear they recount migration tales. Other anecdotes will be heard on the other side of the work, just as a version of this walking pattern and other dance and light cues will return: a woman tracing sharp lines in the air with her arms as she leans back into an impossible knee hinge, bringing her torso near parallel with the floor and a man dressed in black with a target of white light illuminating his back, dragging the beam across the stage. 

Animals of Distinction in “Frontera” by Dana Gingras. Photograph by Tony Turner

The scrutiny of the lighting amplified Gingras’s critique, laid out in a program note, of how technology both wields and obscures power. Searchlights crisscross the stage and land momentarily on sprinting dancers; bars of light descend like a prison gate and separate individuals from the group; a blue line of light travels the stage horizontally and scans the huddled bodies on it. Though “Frontera,” muses on mass migration, the form hits a deeper, highly designed note when questioning technology: who or what has a right to privacy?  

Much of the dancing also pushed on this theme through mirroring and tracking alongside each other. Even in the most acrobatic and improbable of passes, they struggle to shake off a tail. Still, there were moments in which it seemed their bodies could not be contained. The stamina of the dancers was Olympic and the hard-hitting band that was revealed in silhouette upstage also brought a ferocious energy in these moments of attempted escape.  

A later pile up of bodies shows that once again, the center cannot hold. The dancer spit out returns to her heroic hinge backward into the mass, arms slicing. She sets off a chain reaction that is the tunnel moment in reverse: they drag each other apart and off the opposite sides of the stage. The beams of light also return, but this time they are more curious and personal, spotlights that a few of the dancers seem to relish and almost bathe in. The women post up in the shadows between the bars for a gestural fight in and out of the light as we listen to cuts of a Donald Trump speech about building a border wall (from his first term as president). The men return to thrash about with them and the group energy eventually pushes them all off stage. 

Animals of Distinction in “Frontera” by Dana Gingras. Photograph by Tony Turner

The end loops us back to a light trick from the beginning. Two dancers run back on for a final embrace. Targets of light illuminate their bodies. As they back away, this time, they take the light with them. Multiple meanings now permeate the darkness, among them uncertainty and hope. 

As I left the theater, the virtuosic dancing recalled a new work I saw earlier in the week during the Limón Dance Company’s season at the Joyce Theater. Kayla Farrish’s “The Quake that Held Them All,” explored the very human side of migration. The Limón dancers made the most of Farrish’s explosive choreography and concentric circles of protest and care.

The combination of dance, design, music, and theme was also reminiscent of choreographer Hofesh Shechter. In 2017, his work “Grand Finale,”came to the BAM Next Wave Festival and featured a set of moving walls that was a structure for both containing and showing off the irrepressible freedom of the dancers. While I am not sure “Frontera,” hit as poignant a note as either “Grand Finale,” or “Quake,” its message of resistance was received.

Candice Thompson


Candice Thompson has been working in and around live art for over two decades. She was a dancer with Milwaukee Ballet before moving into costume design, movement education and direction, editing and arts writing. She attended New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts, graduated from St. Mary’s College LEAP Program, and later received an MFA in literary nonfiction from Columbia University. She has written extensively about dance for publications like Andscape, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and ArtsATL, in addition to being editorial director for DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded.

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