January 19, 2005

Will and Grace
By Trey Graham

Paata Tsikurishvili is another director who’s gifted at taking familiar stories and finding startling, visually expressive ways to make them fresh – the Synetic Theater’s Salomé, to name just one – but for his latest project he started not with a text but with an idea: Bohemians is an all but wordless survey of human hubris and error, a sinuous movement piece that starts with a hypnotic account of the Fall and tracks our sorry story right up to the present with a funny-poignant sequence about cloning.

Actually, it starts a bit before the Fall, with a mass of black-clad dancers making like molecules in some primordial soup as someone makes moody noises on a cello. Pizzicato strings strike, fingers flutter like electrical discharges, and the writhing, vibrating bits of matter have coalesced into something that divides, in turn, into two. Individuation, gender, partnership, offspring- and soon enough a black-masked figure insinuating himself serpentlike into the scene, proffering an apple that glitters a seductive gold.

If you’re wondering why it sounds more like modern dance than theater, you’re probably not wondering alone – but then the Synetic style has always been movement-based, and fans of Paata and Paata’s actress-choreographer wife, Irina Tsikurishvili, won’t feel too lost. If some of the philosophical or physical gestures that constitute Bohemians’ 90-ish minutes will strike the jaundiced eye as pat or passé, it’s still an inventive and vigorous exercise, and the seven Syneticians involved throw themselves into it with enough energy and conviction to make it fun.

And moving, at least occasionally: Standout moments include a particularly lyrical passage in the tale of Cain and Abel, in which a healthy harvest, a blighted crop, a slaughtered goat, and a sacrificial flame are all evoked by graceful, economic movements of hand or arm or body. A later sequence retells the Tower of Babel story (only here do words briefly augment the idiosyncratic music the underscores the entire business), and later still a witty if perhaps overlong section, “The Age of Kings,” plays variations on themes of power – power lusted for, power abused, power as plaything, power lost.

It’s an ensemble show, to be sure, but Synetic regular Greg Marzullo gets a little more stage time than the others, playing, Cain, the Tempter, and other key figures with an impressive fluidity and strength. Irina Tsikurishvili, always a figure of immense presence and poise, is the other standout.

Ultimately, in fact, the performances are what keep Bohemians from what might, in less devoted and skillful hands, read like a trite little treatise on human nature. The evening ends with a suggestion that there might be a little hope if, the next time it’s offered, we can manage to take a pass on that apple. What it really holds out, though, is the simple gift of unabashed, uninhibited art.