Super Nothing

In the world premiere of Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing,” the quartet of performers fly through the vast, empty black box theater at New York Live Arts, small forms cast out like particles of light. In these diffuse intervals, Jay Carlon traces a speedy circle around the stage, sprinting while also somehow managing to get his hands down for a bear crawl in between strides. Evelyn Lilian Sanchez Narvaez ascends the house stairs, jingling her bracelets as if in communication with unseen spirits. Wendell Gray II and Justin Faircloth leap over one another in virtuosic play. Gravity, and any pull toward center stage, ceases to exist.

Performance

Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing”

Place

New York Live Arts, New York, NY, January 12 2025

Words

Candice Thompson

Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

At other times, the group contracts itself so tightly that the dense tangle becomes a kind of black hole of interlocking limbs. Transitions quicken, their positions revolve, and they roll over each other in waves, legs barely clearing each other’s heads. The negative space around them expands as our gaze finds theirs.

Gutierrez was Live Arts’s 2023-24 Randjelović / Stryker Resident Commissioned Artist. The generous program offers salary and healthcare, two years of residency time, and a commission. “Super Nothing,” and the haunting world it evokes recalled the culmination of the 2021-2022 residency, Faye Driscoll’s “Weathering.” While the works are formally different, the big questions they ask and the profound way in which their casts collaborate and co-exist inside the collective moment of choreography and performance, speaks to the greater need for this kind of institutional support. Time, space, money, care—these are non-negotiable elements for nurturing our art form and yet, it is rare for a choreographer to receive them all at once.

While “Weathering,” was an accelerating maelstrom of decomposition and interconnectivity that was inspired by questions around climate change, “Super Nothing,” was a shuddering, shapeshifting community of survivors grappling with grief. It begins with a cell-phone message and land acknowledgment that, ultimately, becomes an associative prose poem of repeating phrases and non-sequiturs that asks:

What will happen to us?

Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

Carlon, Faircloth, Gray II, and Narvaez proceed to give us a summary version of possibilities, with all the highs and lows, not leaving out clubbing, hang overs, and aerobics class. Convulsing is their connective tissue, with a wide variety of shudders, shakes, gyrations, and the occasional twerk, transmitting and absorbing energy. The pulsing is naturally ambiguous and allows for pluralistic reading. As a formal movement language, it feeds transitions. When the group quakes in a heap on the ground, is it in lament or in generation of strength? Is it desperate or erotic? Near the end, Carlon extends his shudders to posture, conduct, and pray.

Carolina Ortiz’s graphic lighting design left the house lit for what seemed like the first twenty minutes of the show. Once dark, a large red sun illuminates the back wall. Shadows of branches pass over it and later, it morphs into two yellow, and then blue, circles that roam the space and converge like search lights. Bars of light flicker on us as the dancers leave the stage to change into brighter versions of their costumes—sheer tunics, shorts, and miniskirts—from Jeremy Wood. Rosana Cabán’s score, with contributions from Gutierrez, begins with loud drumming and shifts in unsettling ways to include gongs, muddled remixes, and a song for the aerobics routine that repeats, “I’m wide awake.”

Despite the organic feeling of it all, Gutierrez’s craft is felt. The architectural positions of repose that open the work, like a side-lying pike held with head suspended off the floor into spinal alignment, are echoed in the intricate revolutions of the group when the partnering becomes more fraught and frenetic. Strong images repeat for greater poignancy, as when the trio rallies around Gray II, lying on his back with Narvaez holding his arm aloft and tracing her fingers over his chest. What may be a scene of mourning is a mere moment that everyone moves on from, though I was grateful to see it, and feel it, again.

In the end, a unison phrase shatters into individual loops that repeat for several minutes without tiring. Arms shape around invisible partners; the performers form a vibrating line downstage. Their beseeching looks and penetrating eye contact demand our presence too. As they retreat upstage, still adamantly moving in their loops, this demand only increases with their distance. They spread their arms wide so that they are close, but not quite touching. As three slowly travel offstage, their palms flip up and rotate back down as if telegraphing a message through their fingertips to Faircloth, left alone onstage.

Miguel Gutierrez’s “Super Nothing.” Photograph by Maria Baranova

I saw this performance while the city of Los Angeles, where Gutierrez and some members of the production call home, was still battling destructive fires. *In the interval since, as I write this, nonprofit funding has been threatened with existential cuts** amid the chaotic circus of our current government and the dizzying doom cycle of news it feeds. Capitalism demands that we create and consume things, even our grief at all of the above, at an ever-faster pace.

But in this moment, I am utilizing every strategy I have to resist that churn because it can so easily turn despair into apathy, without spurring action or activism. I am giving myself time to sit with art that inspires more hope and inquiry. I first wrote about “Weathering,” two years ago and it has now been three weeks since I saw “Super Nothing,” which might seem like ancient history in the modern race we are running. But I am still thinking about and digesting these two works and the questions they left me with, including:

What can we learn to let go of while still holding on tight to each other?

This Live Arts’ residency, and what these two choreographers have created with it, is a reminder that we can let go of the transactional timeline of producing more and faster. We don’t have to fall into the trap of wondering about or asking artists what they are up to next. If we stay present to what feeds and connects us, even if that happens to be a work of live art already past, it may not be breaking news, but it might still be information that is just as vital to our survival.

*L.A. artists could still use your help, check out this Go Fund Artists spreadsheet.

**For more information on the Federal Funding Freeze and how you can advocate for art, Dance/NYC has created this helpful page.

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. From 2010-2021 she was editorial director of DIYdancer, a project-based media company she co-founded. Her writing on dance can be found in publications like Andscape, ALL ARTS, ArtsATL, The Brooklyn Rail, Dance Magazine, and The New York Times.

comments

Rachel Howard February 13, 2025

Loved this incredibly thoughtful review so much.

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