Every section operated as a non-sequitur: the stop-motion duet, the parallel-play group dances, and a strangely flat, red-lit rave vignette. There were also a few disconnected solos in which the dancers spoke passages from The Waves and/or performed hyper-specific, often juvenile, gestures. Some yanked at their cheeks—or split their butt cheeks—rather like Jim Carrey’s Ace Ventura, but without any of his dazzling energy or comedic timing. And their Waves quotes felt shoehorned in. It did not seem like Soulier was engaging with Woolf’s text so much as paying lip service to it. 

In the program notes, Soulier wrote: “The gestures on which we are working are always incomplete, they point to something beyond themselves, and I have the feeling that this incompleteness can allow them to recall these complex experiences associated with movements….I do not mean that the spectator will be reminded of a specific episode of his life, but that the specific character of the gestures created by referring to another movement can activate his own bodily memory with all its physical and psychological ramifications. The incompleteness of the gestures thus aims to set in motion the physical history of the viewer.” That’s a wordy mess but a fine project, and not an uncommon one in contemporary and neoclassical dance. An excellent recent example of incomplete gestures summoning deep emotional reserves can be found in Pam Tanowitz’s “Law of Mosaics,” made for the New York City Ballet in 2024. Tanowitz expertly wielded fragmented and detached story ballet mime to prompt profound feeling.    

Nancy Goldner explains a similar process in her brilliant analysis of the narrative impenetrability of Balanchine’s masterpiece “Serenade.”  In that ballet, the dancers engage in overtly specific storytelling, though it is ultimately unclear what the overarching narrative is; and the mystery contributes to a more personal and emotional experience for the audience. Goldner looked to literature for analogs and found one in Shakespearean scholar Stephen Greenblatt’s theory of “strategic opacity.” Goldner quoted Greenblatt on how Shakespeare, in his later plays, “could provoke in the audience and in himself a peculiarly passionate intensity of response, if he took out a key explanatory element.”