Review of The Rite of Spring / The Mirror – Stravinsky’s Vulgar and Digital-like by Alexander Whiteley | platform

TTechnology can sometimes seem to invade its own life and marginalize the people it nominally helps. This tension, even conflict, is the subject of Mirror, a new duet by Alexander Whiteley, which is in fine tune with the choreography’s deployment of digital, generative technologies and virtual reality.

In black and white leotards studded with motion capture markers, Gabriel Cioli and Daisy Dancer move themselves in spirals and symmetries that veer from close-up to counter-drag and back again. This unstable but interconnected dynamic is interrupted by an impersonal beam of light that scans the space, giving rise to flashing rectangles on the foreground canvas, like so many frames of a screen—a gateway to the apparition of a luminous digital doppelgänger that first echoes the dancers and then ascends the stage, who now turn their attention away from each other and toward their ghostly avatars.

So far, so good; But from here it seems that the creative team has all turned in the same direction. The human drama is still happening on some level (she leaves, he stays, angry and estranged, and reconnects), but it’s almost incidental to a long series of scenes that float in alien soundscapes and seem inadvertently captured by their special effects — bodies doubled, movement turned to dendritic shimmer, shadows melted into cosmic dust. In short: technology wins for no good reason.

Humans and bodies figure prominently in Whiteley’s version of The Rite of Spring, a kind of proto-technical sequel to Mirror Film that uses some of the same digital effects to punch and zoom, and is set on the same set: foreground and background fabrics for projections, an enclosed circle of light at center stage, now with a box of ropes at its axis like a makeshift column.

Five dancers direct Stravinsky’s totem score, which is played here in a distorted, multi-layered version matched by sharp edges and blocky spaces between torques and stabs (Whitley’s choreography is uncharacteristically primitive).

Ciulli has another meandering solo, and Elaini Lalousis is chosen for a somewhat anti-climatic sacrificial dance. One interesting moment seems to connect a tight circle of dancers to an iridescent ring of colour, reminiscent of the Meta icon of artificial intelligence – but it passes, like the piece itself, with its energies strangely dissipated.