Their combative dynamics continue as dancers multiply in the tight space around Rone. The house lights go down and now I can feel the bass in my seat. The dancers thrash to syncopated beats, emphasizing an apparent disregard for safety, heads banging an inch from what looks like a concrete floor, fists narrowly missing one another as they pump the air. They surf Rone over their heads and in this confined space he skims the ceiling before tumbling down in an adagio of arms grappling, reaching, and crawling.

A dreamy sound of faraway choral voices marks a shift; sand pours from the ceiling in two narrow streams. Rone climbs up to a high perch and vapes while the dancers begin to navigate down to the floor of the stage. 

More couples form and fight. They climb onto each other’s shoulders, jerking heads around and eventually undressing their partners. But I am mostly unable to focus on their progressions because up in the former club area a man is stabbing a woman. Her body flops like a limp rag. During the short time it takes for me to wonder whether this violence is meant to be the very literal enactment it seems to be, or if it is a farce, the scene has developed into what looks like torture, her head forced down at an unseemly angle, and then, full-blown rape. Completely limp on her back with a leg splayed hideously out to the side, the man pumps his hips into her to the rhythm of the beat. 

In what feels like a never-ending vignette that is now threatening to overshadow everything that came before, their sadistic mime continues. Post-rape, he tosses her around, dragging her by the hair. When she eventually escapes and climbs up onto the very top of the set, she somehow overpowers him and we are forced to follow a gratuitous revenge as she strangles, sodomizes, and bludgeons him. Naked dancers raise their fists down below. Is this gesture in resistance to this traumatizing depiction? And was this cruelty between two individuals meant as a stand-in for the larger violence of the world? I am left with many questions about the lack of nuance in the prosaic choreography and the murky romantic-political conflation—all of which in this theatrical setting feels unjustified and suddenly, very uncool. When fish rain down from the sky in some kind apocalyptic transition, I am simply relieved.