Reaching Out To Fill That Inner Void: ‘I Love You So Much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH’ (The NoPro Review)
Koryn Ann Wicks uses immersive to remix dance performance in Santa Monica
What is the point of performance, really?
There is a point early in the hour-ish runtime is Koryn Ann Wicks’ I Love You So Much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH where one of the three principle dancers, having combed through the audience attempting to connect with patron after patron, performs longingly, ecstatically for a young man she plucked out at random.
In that moment as she performs for him, and by extension us, the nature of her act is clear. It is one of extreme vulnerability, with her whole body bent towards a frantic need for acceptance. It scratches deep beneath the surface of the performative impulse, which often masks vulnerability in bombastic excess. Yet pushed to an extreme it is apt to circle back around, as it does here, until the exaggeration becomes an honest assessment of the need lurking within us all.
Wicks’ work here seems to be constructed around this principle: that the space between performer and audience is a medium of connection. And while there’s nothing in the way of narrative agency placed into the hands of her audience, neither are we confined to seats or limited to our standing room only starting points.
Indeed, at times individuals in the audience become props and/or partners of the dancers. Some going so far as the mirroring even athletic portions of the choreography. There isn’t narrative thrust in these moments so much as there is thematic inclusion: we too seek to connect through performance. To something all too often hidden away by social graces and the demands of the marketplace.
Dance has long been one of the secret weapons of immersive. Sleep No More and Then She Fell — the standard bearers of our Renaissance — likely would not have taken the role they have if they weren’t dance theatre pieces first and foremost. The dancer’s discipline, rooted in the physical relation of bodies to space and to each other, cuts to the quick of the immersive impulse in ways perhaps no other can.
Wick’s theme for the piece is this longing for love, with solos becoming participatory duets that then give way to ensemble pieces. Her project here, in engaging immersive techniques, seems to be to overthrow the staid relationship between audience and dancers. To create a permeable barrier which, while still firmly in the control of the performers, nevertheless opens portals between their reality and our own.
Only to gently close them again, as time does for so many of our relationships.
There is grace where form meets function meets theme. Grace that can be found here.
I Love You So Much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH had a two-night performance at Highways Performance Space 1651 18th St. Santa Monica, CA 90404 on July 12th & 13th. A remount is planned for this Fall.
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