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    Review: Sharon Eyal’s ‘R.O.S.E.’ Throws a Rave at the Armory

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    The choreographer Sharon Eyal turns the Drill Hall of the Armory into a club at which her dancers appear at intervals, behaving oddly.In recent years, several choreographers, mostly from Europe, have tried to put club culture and the experience of a rave onto a theater stage. Sharon Eyal’s “R.O.S.E.” goes further: It is a rave.For the production’s North American premiere, the back quarter of the Park Avenue Armory’s vast Drill Hall has been converted into a club. The huge volume of vertical space and the vaulted roof, high above, suggest a converted airplane hangar or factory. Seatless risers (with a small section of chairs reserved for those who need them) surround a central dance floor. In one corner, the D.J. Ben UFO expertly controls the sonic flow, as colored lights (designed by Alon Cohen and Brandon Stirling Baker) rhythmically pierce the haze from many angles.There is a cast of professional dancers, but they don’t appear until 45 minutes into the full three-hour experience. They perform for intervals of five to 15 minutes, then disappear for similar amounts of time, leaving the audience to entertain itself until the next appearance — dancing or watching others dance, perhaps buying a drink from one of the two bars.Those performers are an odd tribe, though the oddness will be familiar to anyone who has seen the work that Eyal, an Israeli choreographer, has been creating with Gai Behar, a rave producer, for the last decade or so. Heavy eyeliner streaks down their faces, as though they’ve been weeping. Their androgynous costumes (by Maria Grazia Chiuri of Christian Dior Couture) are like lingerie, lacy and artfully torn, some accessorized with matching cowls and cinch sacks.At first, they stick together in formations, opening up as rose petals do then snaking through the crowd and up and down the risers like a conga line of consumptives. Angular and so uptight they’re almost arthritic, they mince on the balls of their feet and strike mildly contortionist, Mannerist poses. They appear to have been broken and awkwardly glued back together. At one point, they do a clumpy kick line while connected hand to earlobe rather than arm over shoulder. But such flashes of wit are exceptions. Often the performers press knuckles to their cheeks, like clowns miming sadness.Like dancers in a club, they pulsate to the beat, rolling shoulders, cocking hips, pumping pelvises. But they don’t do this naturally. Rather, they resemble aliens trying imitate dancers in a club, mimicking the moves but missing the feel. Despite the lingerie and a few fetish gestures like hands on throats, they are devoid of eroticism. Even in solos, they don’t find any freedom of motion. The crowd may cheer them on, but they are trapped in Eyal’s aesthetic, unable to get down.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Review: ‘Inside Light’ Gives a Taste of Stockhausen’s Opera Epic

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      At the Park Avenue Armory, a five-hour selection of pieces from the 29-hour “Licht” cycle is best appreciated as a marathon performance.How often can you describe five hours of excerpts from an opera as a drop in the bucket of the whole?But Karlheinz Stockhausen’s epic “Licht” — 29 hours of enormous forces, fanciful notions (a camel as candidate for galactic president) and loopy cosmogony — is no ordinary opera. It calls for multiple spaces, and at one point multiple helicopters, dwarfing even Wagner’s mighty “Ring,” a mere dozen or so hours that can fit in a single theater.Presenting bits of “Licht,” as the Park Avenue Armory is doing with the vivid yet meditative, ultimately stirring “Inside Light,” still means presenting quite a lot. For viewers, it’s a six-and-a-half-hour commitment, counting a pair of intermissions and dinner break. But it’s worth it: Written over about 25 years starting in the late 1970s, and never produced — because it’s almost unproduceable — all at once, “Licht” is one of the sui generis works of art from the turn of the 21st century.In Amsterdam in 2019, the stage director and impresario Pierre Audi put on a three-day festival of chunks from the cycle, which is divided into seven operas, each named for a day of the week. As the Armory’s artistic director, Audi has now brought to New York a yet smaller, but still valuable, selection.You can see the program in two parts, half on Wednesday, half on Thursday. But I recommend going on Friday to see it as I did: a back-to-back marathon. With Stockhausen (1928-2007), the experience blossoms, and becomes more oddly moving, the more of his music you take in, ending up greater than the sum of its parts.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More