A hypnotic evening of dance, Ballet Preljocaj’s performance of Gravity on Wednesday was nothing short of mesmerizing. Watching twelve incredibly strong dancers move joyfully throughout an 80-minute program that seemingly defies gravity, liberates bodies from their weight, and frees them from all constraints — including the traditional vocabulary and movement of ballet — made for a fascinating evening of dance at the Granada.
Starting with a puddle of bodies scattered on stage in near darkness, limbs gradually rise up from the pile and slowly form clusters until eventually all 12 dancers are upright and visible with a dawning stage light, set to the sound of cicadas chirping. Gravity, choreographed by Angelin Preljocaj in 2018, opens like a birth, as dancers explore the physical ideas of weight, speed, and pathways through space.
As Preljocaj wrote in his Choreographer’s Note: “Gravitation is one of the four fundamental forces that govern the universe. It refers to the force which means two masses are attracted to one another. It is invisible, intangible, essential. But it is the force which creates the attraction that we call weight. For years, these issues of weight, space, speed, and mass have intuitively run through my choreographic experiments.