Questo sito non supporta completamente il tuo browser. Ti consigliamo di utilizzare Edge, Chrome, Safari o Firefox.

Twists and Turns

As part of a new two-week summer dance festival, Lincoln Center brings back a popular work by French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane first shown in NYC ten years ago. “Tordre,” which means to twist or contort, is a duet that operates as double solos. The two performers—Lithuanian Lora Juodkaite and US born London based Annie Hanauer—are each endowed with a kind of super power: Hanauer wields a prosthetic forearm, wrist, and hand as deftly as a conductor’s wand, and Juodkaite can out-spin the most devoted of Sufi trance dancers. In “Todre,” Ouramdane raises certain expectations, then proceeds to undermine them by both overfulfilling and not at all.

Performance

Compagnie de Chaillot: “Tordre” by Rachid Ouramdane

Place

Lincoln Center Contemporary Dance Festival, Alice Tully Hall, New York, NY, June 27, 2026

Words

Karen Hildebrand

Annie Hanauer in “Tordre” by Rachid Ouramdane. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

The stage is stark white, with light by Stéphane Braillot as glaring as a physician’s office, and two sets of slender suspended beams designed by Sylvain Giraudeau that suggest the performers will engage in aerial dance. The two dancers enter to a musical fanfare. Like hosts of a variety show, they stride onto the stage, arms stretched wide in glassy smiled welcome. But the show is illusory. The musical clip repeats like a broken record. The dancers enter and exit until at last a guitar strum signals the real show has begun on a very different note. 

Juodkaite takes the first solo, slowly twisting around herself, off center, hip jutted, one leg hyperextended, the other flexed. She arches into an astonishing standing backbend. Fluid as water, she draws our eyes to each moving body part in turn, underscored by a harmonic repetitive hum. Hanauer’s solo creates the impression of being pushed around on the stage, her blonde hair whipping with the impact. Hers is a more angular version of Juodkaite’s isolations. The music has the marching rhythm of a heartbeat. When she drops from a backbend down to the floor, she lingers there. A shadow of the overhead beam falls like a cross over her prone body.

Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer in “Tordre” by Rachid Ouramdane. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

Lora Juodkaite and Annie Hanauer in “Tordre” by Rachid Ouramdane. Photograph by Lawrence Sumulong

Juodkaite returns to continuously twirl on releve like a figurine atop a music box. Round and round, she makes a loop of the stage, as if she can’t stop. Hanauer watches and waits to catch her in an embrace, several times but cannot seem to save the whirling dancer from her obsession.

With raised arms, head upturned, Juodkaite works her arms like signal flags: one hand on her face, then both hands covering her mouth, then encircling her neck, elbows poking up like rabbit ears. As she spins, her shape shifts the way of clay on a throwing wheel under skillful hands of a potter. Then she simply stops, her gaze improbably calm and steady. 

The two each take another solo, this time with an audio element: Hanauer does a kind of physical karaoke to a recording of Nina Simone performing the song, “Feelings,” live in a club. Simone steals this scene. A trill of the piano keys that undulates through Hanauer’s spine is impressive, but a barrel turn matches the music a little too exactly. Juodkaite delivers a French laced poetic monologue while twirling—I catch only a fraction of the text, but to speak calmly while spinning seems a feat so impossible that I’m sure it’s a recording. Until she pointedly removes her microphone at the end.  

When Hanauer balances in an arabesque, she reaches so high that I think, yes, finally she’s going to climb onto the hanging beam. But no, like the previous false entrances, it’s a feint. Instead, she drapes herself across the lower bar, dangling an arm to the floor. It’s as if these solos deliver the internal monologues of the characters that exist beneath the performative masks of the showgirls who entered the beginning scene. At the end of Juodkaite’s monologue, she speaks directly to Hanauer: “Annie, I just finished now. Let’s find the end together.” But the flashy unison Charleston they end with is a disappointing reversion to their previous personas. They’ve gone back to Clark Kent, protecting their true identifies for another day. 

 

Karen Hildebrand


Karen Hildebrand is former editorial director for Dance Magazine and served as editor in chief for Dance Teacher for a decade. An advocate for dance education, she was honored with the Dance Teacher Award in 2020. She follows in the tradition of dance writers who are also poets (Edwin Denby, Jack Anderson), with poetry published in many literary journals and in her book, Crossing Pleasure Avenue (Indolent Books). She holds an MFA from the Program for Writers at Warren Wilson College. Originally from Colorado, she lives in Brooklyn.

subscribe to the latest in dance


“Uncommonly intelligent, substantial coverage.”

Your weekly source for world-class dance reviews, interviews, articles, and more.

Already a paid subscriber? Login

comments

Ricorda che i commenti devono essere approvati prima di essere pubblicati

Featured

Twists and Turns
REVIEWS | Karen Hildebrand

Twists and Turns

As part of a new two-week summer dance festival, Lincoln Center brings back a popular work by French choreographer Rachid Ouramdane first shown in NYC ten years ago. “Tordre,” which means to twist or contort, is a duet that operates as double solos.

Continua a leggere
Flying colours
REVIEWS | Gracia Haby

Flying colours

Upon arrival, colour greets me, and how. A wall of colour and pattern by Jeffrey Gibson, a member of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw Indians and of Cherokee descent, it is joyous and intriguing, loaded and bright. Snaking up the two sides, in blue lettering, all caps, a tantalising premise: “The only way out is through.”

Continua a leggere
Good Subscription Agency