Moving among and between a set depicting an active photo studio, complete with tripods, reflective umbrellas, video screens and costume racks, a trio of dancers (Holley Farmer, Rashaun Mitchell and Banu Ogan, like Mr. Bokaer, formerly of the Merce Cunnigham Dance Company) sporting sequins and nautical-inspired dinner jackets designed by Isaac Mizrahi, and moving to punctuating music that almost sounds like the inner workings of a photo development machine, interact in near perfect disillusionment that there is anyone else on the stage but them. It is not so much narcissism as a complete lack of emotional interaction between counterparts that leave the piece feeling cold and unconnected.

Is that the point? Bokaer’s dancers move both their bodies and the set pieces of which they are a part (and from which they are indistinct) like precise, well-oiled cogs in some symbolic wheel whose meaning is just beyond our grasp. Their slicing, fluid, almost violent movement belies any kind of humanization we might otherwise expect from such precise, physically intimate choreography. Magnifying this eerie sense of detachment is a larger-than-life video screen, comprised of white photo umbrellas that bend and distort the live video feed projecting on it from on-stage cameras—providing a topographic duality to the already flattened, paper-doll forms that appear throughout the piece as Michael Cole’s visual backdrop and a silent “fourth dancer” of sorts.

In small, quiet, repetitive moments, the trio retreats to the far corner of the stage, exhibiting personal ticks and fidgets that would normally go unnoticed by all but the most discerning eye. However, images of the body and its “flaws” are amplified on three video screens that offer real-time playback, underscoring video’s role in the business of being watched, and lost, among the additive nature of feed after feed.

Thematic content aside, I found the contact with one another at times gentle and deliberate, but I felt no sense of commitment to the movement beyond the physical strength necessary to carry it out. Even when portraying something inanimate, or something, that when reduced again and again, should approach absence or a sense of moving toward something ever-diminishing, it is possible to convey the fundamental point  without draining all of the energy out of the movement. This is where I feel the dancers fell short. While technically adept, each dancer seemed a less full version of themselves, like a thin photo negative never given the chance to fully develop—an absence that while I am sure was deliberate, I felt detracted from the piece, regardless of its relation to the overall suggested theme.

There were two moments that were particularly evocative for me. The first unfolds as a single dancer collects Polaroid photos she has previously shot during and earlier segment of the performance—further underscoring the physical and visual connection between media and movement—and surrounds herself with a kaleidoscope of these black and white boxes, changing the shapes and patterns as she revises and erases her surroundings. While beginning as the architect of these images, she now literally inserts herself back into the pictures, of which she was not originally part, forcing the viewers to contemplate the ramifications of insertion, modification, revision and erasure. 

The second occurs in a startling moment of poignancy and softness that exists in contrast to the violence of constant movement and the invasive eye of the lens. The dim, focused light reveals subtle, confident but exploratory gestures by all three dancers, lying face-down, each with a clothing rack forming a perimeter around their angular bodies. Truncating the body and focusing on movement only from the knee down, Bokaer asks us for a moment of gentle reflection, free from the calculation of media and imagery. Bathed in a sea of warm light, each separate limb takes on a repetitive, meditative quality that melds with the overall movement on the stage and underscores, in perhaps the most successful vignette of the evening, how much we as individuals depend on the interaction between vision and its product (images, photos, media, video, reflection) to mold our ideas of addition, subtraction, absence, interaction, function and emotion.