The movement in the dance production alternates between soft and intimate, and raw and visceral, as the performers investigate how to embody the feeling of loss.
“I think that when you lose someone, there’s a step where you want to probably go too,” Lake reflects. “You want to die too, because it’s too much. If I lost my daughter or my parents, you know, it’s like, my god, I don’t want to live anymore. I just want to go. But then, after, there’s a contrast of situations where I think that you want to live for both. You want to breathe again…because life is too great, even if everything is collapsing around [you].”
Most strikingly, there’s a massive curtain that the performers manipulate throughout the work. Using a pulley system made of ropes and carabiners, the dancers change the height and orientation of the fabric themselves, climbing it when it stretches to the rafters—as if they’re ascending from hell—and curling into it when it’s bundled on the floor, as though they’re melting into pools of lava.
All of this will be heightened by the music of Antoine Berthiaume, who will be seated at the side of the stage during the performance, acting as an omniscient narrator. He’ll be prompting the dancers’ movements by weaving live guitar sounds with a pre-recorded score.
Lake describes the world that the performers are caught up in as “onirique”, meaning “dreamlike”.
“Humans always touch together—and how do we touch?” he ponders. “How can I jump into you, and then you catch me? [When] you drop me, how can you help me to get up? So all these situations of hanging and jumping relate to each other. This collectivity, we’ll rise together, and always…find a way to get out too, because we want light. We begin with the tragedy, and then it’s how this collectivity is gonna find…the light at the end to get out of hell.”
Folks who purchase tickets to see Orpheus at PuSh will also get a free code to view Alan Lake Factori(e)’s dance film Parades online. Filmed without physical contact during the pandemic and brimming with symbolism, the work uses parallel editing—four shots placed side by side in one frame—to show bodies morphing, regenerating, and “colliding” with one another without ever having been in the same space.
Ultimately, a priority for Lake and his dancers is going above and beyond to ensure their productions are easy to understand—all while maintaining layers of contextual depth.
