Juodkaite returns to continuously twirl on releve like a figurine atop a music box. Round and round, she makes a loop of the stage, as if she can’t stop. Hanauer watches and waits to catch her in an embrace, several times but cannot seem to save the whirling dancer from her obsession.
With raised arms, head upturned, Juodkaite works her arms like signal flags: one hand on her face, then both hands covering her mouth, then encircling her neck, elbows poking up like rabbit ears. As she spins, her shape shifts the way of clay on a throwing wheel under skillful hands of a potter. Then she simply stops, her gaze improbably calm and steady.
The two each take another solo, this time with an audio element: Hanauer does a kind of physical karaoke to a recording of Nina Simone performing the song, “Feelings,” live in a club. Simone steals this scene. A trill of the piano keys that undulates through Hanauer’s spine is impressive, but a barrel turn matches the music a little too exactly. Juodkaite delivers a French laced poetic monologue while twirling—I catch only a fraction of the text, but to speak calmly while spinning seems a feat so impossible that I’m sure it’s a recording. Until she pointedly removes her microphone at the end.
When Hanauer balances in an arabesque, she reaches so high that I think, yes, finally she’s going to climb onto the hanging beam. But no, like the previous false entrances, it’s a feint. Instead, she drapes herself across the lower bar, dangling an arm to the floor. It’s as if these solos deliver the internal monologues of the characters that exist beneath the performative masks of the showgirls who entered the beginning scene. At the end of Juodkaite’s monologue, she speaks directly to Hanauer: “Annie, I just finished now. Let’s find the end together.” But the flashy unison Charleston they end with is a disappointing reversion to their previous personas. They’ve gone back to Clark Kent, protecting their true identifies for another day.
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