On the Board’s December offering, In Tandem, featured three duets by long-time collaborators. Alex Carrington and Chelsea Reichart open the showcase, dancing in comet, whom I love, choreographed by Maurya Kerr of Bay Area company Tinypistol. Angie Hauser and Darrell Jones perform Fable, with creative direction from Bebe Miller, bringing nearly three decades of working closely together through the Bebe Miller Company. Leslie Seiters and Rachael Lincoln bring twenty-five years of west coast collaboration through teaching, performing, and choreographing to Fast Craft: Satellite. But I arrive with little experience in the realm of duets or dance at large – what I do know is that duets necessitate tension and reaction between the two bodies. Are they in opposition? Do they have gravity? Do they mock, mimic, or perturb each other? What I encounter brings me into a loving orbit, across the history of two storied dancers, and through the apocalypse with humor and care.
In comet, whom I love, thick gold light outlines Reichert and Carrington’s untouching bodies. They stretch and reach their arms alongside each other, legs taut and heavy. A glistening ambient soundtrack by Joel St Julien swells. Reichert’s face is tense and drawn; Carrington’s gaze soft and open. As they turn away, Reichert begins to stand, reaching for Carrington and making the first contact: an open palm to the back of the neck. This connection pushes the performance into one of closeness and distance, reaction and escape.
A foot touches a forehead, limbs whirl as if caught in the same current, a low hug becomes a slow rotation back and forth, the hand of one guiding the back of the other. As Carrington’s gaze shifts in small fixed rotations, Reichart chases her gaze to remain in orbit, moving in massive arcs across the stage. Their movement back and forth feels celestial – the sun moves so little, while those far-off planets must move a thousand times the distance to complete one rotation. The movement of each is consequential to the other.
Reichert and Carrington lower to the floor in an embrace – the music deepens – and they begin a close bodily orbit, forehead pressed against forehead. One rotates as the other falls across the floor. As they move, they appear to be spinning out in space, no gravity to hold them in a fixed point but for the head of the other pushing them into the earth. Their movement is an embrace in equilibrium; where one pushes up, the other must push down to remain in place. Where they began on two isolated planes–unaffected by each other, by the end they hold each other as they fall in place, captured by each other’s gravitational pull.
Fable works with a different kind of gravity – where the history of the performers becomes the weight that informs their movement today. FABLE picks up the threads of previous Bebe Miller Company performances and frames a new conversation between the same dancers. Hauser, Jones, and Miller have worked together for the better part of three decades, and their improvisation during In Tandem references specific gestures and soundtracks from previous works. In an interlude between FABLE and the previous piece, Miller and Hauser conduct a staged interview, where they discuss dance as“how are we with this music.” Hauser and Jones engage in this dialog on movement that is full of their shared history.
A projected video begins the performance, showing the duo dancing years prior. Their motions are jagged and intricate, chaotic yet controlled. At one point the back of one’s hand becomes the lever to move the other’s whole body across the room, connected only by the cheek. Their shared emotionality is increased by the video’s high angle and clipped editing, which feel like an allusion to conflict and tension, though the video ends with them at rest, breathing heavily. What physical discussion began between them years ago in the video continues into the room as their duet begins.
Hauser and Jones shift between the past and present as the soundtrack shifts between music from previous performances, with sound by Darren Morze & Michael Wall, and Hahn Rowe, and silence. At one point an audio sample from Landing/Place (2005) plays, and they repeat the gesture from that show: Hauser bent forward at the hips, with Jones walking awkwardly on tip toe to bend over her. Today, their dialog in motion is colloquial at times, with gestures that feel commonplace in a city park, on a crowded dance floor, or moving through their homes. And yet their execution lunges back into technical complexity, hands skittering articulately across each other’s bodies, perfect moments of balance achieved with little visible effort, and natural synchronicities arising and falling as easily. Their ability to move together, to improvise and converse through movement is apparent, the threads of their work binding them together across so much time.
Binding becomes literal as ropes fall from the ceiling before me. FAST CRAFT: Satellite is starting – Seiters and Lincoln enter the starkly lit stage in harnesses and matching pink mohawks. They clip onto the dangling ropes, they leap into the air.
A white spotlight frames each of their bodies that hang a few feet off the floor, their shadows huge on the far wall. Both their faces and the lighting are serious and yet the entrance is also quite playful. The harness can be overtly sexual, phallic, frisky, and funny, but it is also a practical tool that stops falling bodies. There is a contrast between playfulness and dangerous collapse that shows up over and over throughout the work, a balancing act on the brink of ruin.
As they begin to dance, their suspended motions fluctuate between fluid and jerking. A hand slides in an elegant frictionless arc across the dark floor, then suddenly their bodies plummet, landing flatly rigid an inch from the ground in perfect sync. I am reminded of remarks made by sculptor Louise Bourgeois on suspension: that horizonality is a desire to give up, verticality a desire to escape, and suspension the state of ambivalence. An in-between escape and acceptance. They demonstrate this duality as Seiters sends Lincoln into orbit around her: Seiters stands in the middle of the spotlight and uses the rope attached to Lincoln to begin to swing her around in a circle. Lincoln’s out-of-control body whirs close past the audience. What begins as a manic flight slows and quiets as Lincoln walks gently around Seiters’ static stance. They embody both states, one vertical, one horizontal in this gesture; they are simultaneously in motion and yet still. Together they are ambivalence embodied; they are giving up and escaping at the same time. A smile plays at the corner of Seiters’ upright face. Lincoln’s walk is soft. This transition encapsulates the piece for me, using playfulness to move through seriousness, arriving at an intimacy that embodies both at once.
Seiters and Lincoln play with puns as well, none more than when they lose their marbles. As they move across the room, they drag flimsy plastic bags weighted down with heavy stones. OtB fills with the sound of stones dragging across the floor as they move from one side to the other, dancing across the floor with a percussive rhythm. Suddenly the sounds cease. They look out at the audience. They dump the marbles out defiantly, which ricochet around the room, one bouncing off the wall beneath my chair. The empty bags become masks and when they emerge from their bag heads to audible laughter, they gesture with the balls, keeping up the schtick. Rubbing the stones together, they get their rocks off, they wear heavy earrings, they transform the stones into eyeballs, ovaries, testicles, and grins. The balls pass back and forth between their hands, each dancer tipping as the weight becomes unbalanced. As one tips down, they recover together, they provide support for the weight each one carries. This is a moment of transition; where the marbles move from a funny pun into the real weight of carrying sanity in community with each other. They always pull each other back, take some of the burden, and find themselves upright again.
Patsy Cline’s crooner ‘Crazy’ plays as Lincoln and Seiters dance frenetically amidst the wreckage. As the song dies down and they arrive at the back of the room, Seiters uses a marble to scribble on the wall as if she could graffiti the walls of a fallen citadel, leaving a message for those who would come here in the future. Yet Lincoln begins to erase, rubbing the plastic bag furiously behind Seiters, removing the nonexistent marks left by her partner. They play a game of writing and erasing, erasing and erasing, over and over, looping back and forth. They begin in humor, but by the end they feel desperate, trapped in a balance that cannot be maintained, a futile gesture for both the writer and the eraser.
Each part of the collage-like performance draws me across the threshold of emotion with laughter, opening the door to vulnerability, fear, and closeness. The staging toys with collapse – the lighting is cold, the stage becomes littered with rubble and remnants as the show progresses. Music fades in and out of static and sound, a doppler effect of searching for a lost signal. OtB’s massive grey walls become imposing, ominously empty, or scribbled across. When faced with destruction, breakdown, and emptiness, the duo respond with humor that opens up to intimacy and invention.
In the end it is just them and four empty plastic bags. Holding one bag and each hand, they raise the bags above their heads before forcing their arms downwards, inflating the bags with air with one swift motion. They move across the rubble ridden room like this, catching the air over and over. They settle into a steady audible rhythm – the gasp of the plastic through the air is like a forceful exhale, a required exercise of living. We can trust that there is an inhale as their arms raise silently up, the exhale pushed out immediately as they force the bags down. As the lights fade and the sound continues, they have captured my own state of suspension inside the impending apocalypse. I find myself exhaling at the moment the gasp of plastic occurs, my own balancing breath caught inside the inhale/exhale of theirs.
In Tandem took place December 18-20, 2025 at On The Boards. Program available here. Comet, whom I love was created by Maurya Kerr who is the Creator and Artistic Director of tinypistol. Alex Carrington and Chelsea Reichert performed, and music was composed by Joel St. Julien. Fast Craft: Satellite featured Rachael Lincoln and Leslie Seiters as performers and Choreographers, and included contributing direction from Amelia Rudolph & Bebe Miller, with lighting design by Trevor Cushman and music from Ringdown with Caroline Shaw & Danni Lee, Hania Rani, Sumi Jo, Terry Davies, David Lang, and Yaz. Fable was created and performed by Angie Hauser & Darrell Jones, in collaboration with Artistic Director Bebe Miller, music from Darren Morze & Michael Wall, and Hahn Rowe, with video from A History by Lily Skove. Talvin Wilks was Originating Dramaturgy from A History and Lila Hurwitz was Project Manager.
