This film was shot from multiple aspects, and it cycled through them seemingly at random. However, the ghostly, translucent dancers in the projections mostly hovered over their fleshy counterparts, evoking their souls. Every now and then the camera cropped in tightly on one person to display one giant apparition looming over the comparatively antlike humans on the stage. Sometimes the footage was lifted, cutting the scrim in half horizontally and elevating the spectral cast to a second floor, like they were atop a double decker bus. Often, the film included a gridded dance floor in its framing that was absent on the physical stage. The film was frequently angled, as if the shadow dancers were dancing on a raked disco floor. A couple of times, the gridded floor moved back and forth like a conveyer belt and the spectral dancers appeared to travel like the Flash, though they kept the same time as their live doppelgangers. These were my favorite moments: one more level of motion did the most to cut the tedium of the work. The lights briefly flashed red, yellow, then blue at one point in the third section too—which provided a momentary jolt. Spotting the few inconsistencies in casting between the dancers onstage vs. onscreen was also diverting. Picking out which guys got haircuts in the last seven years made for another good game. (The Lyon Opera troupe was filmed in 2016. Lewitt’s original movie was recreated shot for shot—marking the first time the film of “Dance’s” original cast had been supplanted).   

Occasionally, LeWitt’s film would freeze as the dancing onstage carried on. These pauses were all blurry, featuring trailing afterimages of the dancing bodies. A prevailing postmodern definition of dance is motion—any motion. Eating a sandwich, for example. Childs and LeWitt slyly acknowledged this by conveying movement even in these snapshots. This idea was neatly inverted in the second movement, Dance II, which was a solo (originally danced by Childs herself) that began with film alone, as the dancer Noëllie Conjeaud stood perfectly still in parallel in gigantic closeup on the screen for some minutes to Glass’s throbbing score. At first, especially after the insistent kineticism of the opening section, this nearly motionless motion picture could be mistaken for a still photo. But once your eyes adjusted to the new sense of scale, Conjeaud’s blinking and nearly imperceptible weight adjustments became dramatically exciting. Standing still onstage is the hardest thing of all, as anyone who has ever performed the opening of Balanchine’s “Serenade” can tell you. Against your own will, you will move. Though it was unconsciously done, Conjeaud’s slight swaying was the sole motion in “Dance” not rigorously tethered to Glass’s score. Thus, this stationary introduction showcased the only dancerly artistic freedom of the whole night. You could almost call it improv.