Ask most choreographers why so many audience members, when confronted with contemporary dance, will inevitably say that they “just don’t get it,” and the response is likely to involve rolled eyes and long-suffering sighs. Of late, though, another type of response seems to be gaining currency: dances that are, at least partly, about the fact that lots of people just don’t get dance.
So it is in “Choreography, a Prologue for the Apocalypse of Understanding, Get Ready!,” a new dance by D D Dorvillier/human future dance corps that wrapped up its first weekend of performances on Sunday atDance Theater Workshop. The three-part work begins with a text-heavy video announcing Ms. Dorvillier’s intention to renounce words in favor of a less definitive corporeal logic: phrases like “no languages only grunts moans murmurs” fill the screen.
Using language to dismiss language is a hedged bet. This continues in the second section, in which Ms. Dorvillier and Joaquim Pujol, wielding microphones, occupy a white expanse of floor and backdrop, beautifully lighted by Thomas Dunn. Mr. Pujol acts as interpreter, first rendering Ms. Dorvillier’s words and then her actions in Spanish, and finally interpreting her funny little dances through dances of his own. Language becomes just another structural, abstract device, like movement or sound.
Movement and sound take over in the third section, a dance in which Ms. Dorvillier, Heather Kravas, Amanda Piña and Elizabeth Ward (keenly sophisticated performers, all) by turns interact with and add to a collage sound score by Zeena Parkins, who works her usual magic from a front corner of the stage. Clad in shiny unitards of teal, yellow, pink and black, the dancers gallop about the stage, noodling into strange configurations and wiggling their fingers in front of their faces like creeping animals.
There is much humor and beauty in this deconstruction of understanding, but also a sort of dry conceptualism that often marks (and sometimes mars) Ms. Dorvillier’s work. One result is “Get Ready!,” which does not, despite the initial film’s insistence, make its sensual logic felt nearly deeply enough.