Sun Kim, who was born in South Korea and moved to New York City in 2011, shares a difficult experience with countless other artist immigrants: that of applying—and receiving a rejection—for an “alien of extraordinary ability” (O-1) visa. Her full-length work, “Alien of Extraordinary” tells Kim’s personal story through a voiceover script and popping, the style of street dance defined by quick contractions and accentuations, glides, and mechanical isolations. For this production, Kim condensed “Alien” into its most essential parts to share a complete narrative with a total of eight dancers.

The first scene is a pantomime: Sun, wearing an Easter Island-esque mask, has a meeting with a lawyer, a dancer wearing a fully covered balaclava with an abstract design, to discuss her visa application. The dancers’ movements are robotic, visually replicating their characters’ voices. Eventually, another masked dancer emerges, shadowing the steps of the lawyer. Here is where it starts to feel more layered and less like a kind of lipsync. 

Throughout the selections of “Alien,” different dancers don the Easter Island-style mask while all the others appear in the simpler knit face coverings. This is a piece, Kim said before taking the stage, about feeling displaced between worlds—being an alien in multiple senses of the word.

The simultaneously smooth and angular construction of the choreography becomes particularly mesmerizing when all eight dancers fill the stage; exact unison is a powerful thing. The most affecting part of the piece comes at the very end once Kim, the character, learns that her visa application has been denied. 

The full troupe of dancers, now all wearing the mask of the “alien,” come together into an anemone-like cluster, popping their limbs sequentially. Moving closer, their formation is evocative of the first movement in Alvin Ailey’s “Revelations”—the closeness of their bodies and the staggering of their extensions create an entrancing architecture. 

They do separate, and spaced out on the stage—with lights changing dramatically—their precise flicks of shoulders, elbows, and wrists leave a big impression. In popping, the smallest movements can be the most profound. This is clear, when the piece ends: all dancers lined up, remove and lift up their masks in canon. The last dancer on the end, presses their hands to theirs and trembles, their body reverberating as the stage goes to black.