“The Yellow Wallpaper” depicted a common nineteenth century “treatment” that was often prescribed for mainly wealthier, upper class women who exhibited any kind of “out of the ordinary” behavior: For example, outspokenness or unusual meekness; promiscuity or sexual disinterest; too much fainting or not enough fainting. These women were placed in isolation for six to eight weeks at a time, fed a strict diet, and were prohibited from working or socializing. The treatment was called “the rest cure.” 

Appropriately, Rigney’s piece begins with a woman in a fabulous gold Victorian dress slumped over an armchair, resting. The score is a compilation, much of which is new and previously recorded music by the Italian composer Marco Rosano. The piece opens to the gorgeous, haunting sound of Rosano’s collaborator, acclaimed countertenor Andreas Scholl, while a group of dancers surround the woman, snaking their upper bodies and arms side to side. The woman rises, but she never can stand up straight, bound by the corseted dress. She repeatedly falls over in impossible-seeming backbends, draped over the hoop of her skirt like Salvador Dali's melting clocks in Persistence of Memory. Sometimes a leg is extended to the side while she is in the backbend, and she looks like a magician's assistant, with body parts cut up and reassembled incongruously. 

It takes a while to realize that there is something hidden beneath the surface. Eventually, the dress is unbuttoned, and it slides down the woman who emerges liberated in a black slip. As she steps away, the dress pulses and then creeps off the stage, too, along with whomever was hiding underneath it. (Here's a moment that cleverly slithers the line between dramatically captivating and downright funny.)