REVIEW: "You forget the fact that they're dancing."

Dispensing with the niceties of movement “vocabularies,” references to previous or other works or styles, Wreck, a Black Label Movement production now showing in the Dowling Studio at the Guthrie Theater through Sunday, is powerful beyond description. The better choice would be to go, to dive into the water with these dancers, to drift, to fall. First, the drums. The ear-splitting sound of a ship going down, the sound filling the room and then rising, consuming the room, rattling the bones, filling the ears, loud beyond loud, past the point you think it could go— And then thirteen figures file onto the stage, moving to sit on their knees before the screen on which shaking black and white footage plays—and they watch with the terrible seriousness of children as the ore ship before them begins to sink. And then we are in the water. In the echo and eerie reverb of sound at some depth, a watery light comes up on a pile of bodies, which may be dead, may be alive. As the piece flows, with a crushing, inevitable forward motion, these bodies, in their enclosed box of space—the last airtight compartment in the sinking ship—transform. They begin soft, confused, tossed together and apart in the disorder and disorientation of the ship as it goes down. But the bodies, over the course of the piece, grow powerful, almost animal, as the figures fight to survive. These are articulate bodies, and the story they tell is more narratively structured than many movement pieces; but at no point do they spell out a simple story of drowning. They are addressed as a singular body. Though there are solos and duets, there is no superfluous attempt to define or draw out character, no telling of any stories but this one: a bloodless, soundless negotiation of a dwindling share of air. The bodies, though they are almost always moving independently, traverse a single emotional expanse in unison, moving from confusion to fear to grief to desperation, and finally toward their own end. They become a collective, and they draw the audience deeper in the water as they themselves fall. You forget the fact that they’re dancing. Perhaps they aren’t; they’re being moved by the water, fighting it, pulled by it, swaying in its current, tumbling down. The bodies surge, they weaken, they tire, they surge again. As it is with the finest movement performances, your own body begins to follow theirs; in this case, however, the physical empathy you feel is increasingly driven, increasingly desperate, and as you are drawn downward you are both thrilled and afraid. The silence of the dancers is deafening, set against the exquisite score by Mary Ellen Childs. Carl Flink’s choreography and direction is demanding, unexpected, breathless, moving the audience as much as it guides the performers. They’re a powerful body, greater than the sum of its parts—there’s no need to draw out any single dancer. The most consistently effective sections—they’re not discrete pieces, but stages of freefall—are those with all or most of the company performing, where you can see the collective impact of the whole. Two smaller pieces, though, are truly stunning: “Three Men” (Jose Bueno, Joe Crook, Zack Teska) and “Miriam’s Death” (The Company featuring Ashley Akpaka) crystallize the exchange of power, the rareness of air, the struggle to master the water, and the ultimate inability to do that, to triumph over something so great, so absolute, so alive and all-consuming as the water of Lake Superior is.