As Ponomarenko's dancers exited, Dominica Greene sprinted onstage backwards. Greene's mouth remained closed, but her voice welcomed the audience through a pre-recorded audio, introducing her piece, “Openings,” as an ongoing experiment that encourages audiences “to soften into empathy.” 

Next—and suddenly—Greene dropped to the floor, flipping and tumbling further backward. Like a ball accelerating so fast down a hill that it travels up the other side, Greene rolled so quickly that somehow, she made it all the way up the Church's altar (an incredible feat seeing as how the raised stage, separated from the floor like a cliff, is about as tall as Greene is). 

Greene's severed voice and body make for two distinct guides through a kind of embodied experimental support group for caregiving and community-building. Greene led the audience through several activities, from playing volleyball to playing piano, and singing acapella to Prince's “I Wanna Be Your Lover.” 

Although Greene remains the leader of the piece, she is never really in control. At the beginning, for example, Greene embarked on a solo improvisation with her eyes closed. Judson has a large and fairly open space, but a piano, the stage, and the audience, all made for potential obstacles. In this exercise and throughout, Greene both invites and implicates the audience. Would anyone intervene should Greene encounter danger? What kind of a responsibility do we have to care for one another, even for those we don't know?

In “Openings,” Greene places herself in a tremendously vulnerable position. The piece not only encourages but requires audience engagement in order to succeed, and without volunteered audience participation, the show would collapse entirely.

A different kind of risk for an experiment like “Openings” (and any work that sets out to explore ideas as broad as “love” and “empathy”), is to fall into clichés, either in speech or in movement. Except for a few isolated moments that bordered oversimplicity (when Greene invited an audience member to join her onstage to “share her weight,” for example, leaning into her like a slow-motion trust fall, an overused symbol for care and vulnerability), Greene largely avoids the cliché trap, often intervening with humor or an unexpected change of pace just in the nick of time. 

Either way, should Greene fall into clichés, her audience would probably forgive her. Greene is so charming—her speech is full of endearing sighs, chuckles, and the occasional self-deprecation—that an audience is likely to follow her down any road. 

This one certainly did. By the end of the piece, Greene had practically the whole audience out of their seats, laughing, playing, and dancing the Electric Slide. Greene's charisma and powerful movement quality successfully created an opening for her audience, who eagerly stepped right in.