Meg Stuart's choreography for the White Oak Project is an exploration of our contemporary body as a fragmented body. Stuart took Mikhail Baryshnikov's invitation to create this new piece as an opportunity to expand her ongoing choreographic investigation in distortion, visual arts, and psychological and body states, to the language of ballet. Basic ballet movements, as a pirouette, are rearranged, reconfigured, and exhaustively repeated as a way to enhance their ecstatic and transgressive potential. Through this repetition, the dance endures a methodical dismembered, but only for the dancing bodies to emerge, at the end, through a physical and psychological re-membering, as whole. The visual interventions by Bruce Mau, the music of Eleonor Hovda, and the lighting of Michael Hulls supplement this 45 minute piece with an atmosphere lingering between the material and mnemonic, the bodily and the mechanical, between illusion and presence.
André Lepecki - New York, March 12 1996.