How to Fall Apart starts with a memory so universal, so familiar, that I know you have one too. On a dark stage against a backdrop of static dots and quivering spots, voiceovers relate the first time the narrators not just noticed, but contemplated, the evening sky, its black quilt pierced with glittering stars. Recognition of the vastness of the universe and one’s small yet not insignificant place within it can spark wonder in anyone who’s gazed upward. Regardless of who we are or where we are, this reverence binds us together.
Making its New York premiere at Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Jerome Robbins Theater, How to Fall Apart by AMOC (American Modern Opera Company) filters the bombast of dramatic opera through the esoterica of downtown dance. When it works, it works great, exposing our impulse to explain the universe through science and myth. When it doesn’t? Prepare to feel isolated and confused.
The structure reveals itself from the beginning. Outfitted in what I’d dub haute couture scrubs, three dancers and two musician-dancers recount a yarn or a factoid. Then, they dance it out, like a game of reverse Charades. Rinse, repeat. These episodes play like skits, amusing briefly before receding into nothingness. During a bit featuring Matilda Sakamoto on how to make a très bon croissant, one falls out of the sky, ba-dum ching! In another, after telling us how dust from the Sahara feeds the plants of the Amazon, one performer, in shadow save for their hands, waggles their fingers like fronds blowing in the breeze.
There will be props. These include a large pad of white paper that’s ripped into strips and scattered on a prone individual. Later, the remaining foursome acts as pallbearers, toting the victim offstage. The performers return, crowding behind a whirring fan as they recite city names. One artist and then the others collapse at various points. If you guessed these sketches were about climate change, then congratulations. You know exactly how things are falling apart.
The choreography can appear too on point where the motion and emotion are one and the same. Hands are cupped; shoulders are stooped. The quintet reclines on stools, beside stools and near stools. Spatially, they organize into clumps and ridges of varying levels where they stay for a while, like a living mountain range.
Sometimes, the whims pile up so quickly that I struggle to follow them, much less understand their purpose. During a jigging sequence, Julia Eichten prances suggestively on tippy toes, arcs a leg into a yogic bow pose and then juggles her breasts. She also may have blown kisses and done the Charleston in that handful of seconds.
The cast sells the material through their commitment to it. Yiannis Logothetis finds the corners and edges in the stream of soft curves and undulating rhythms. A pas de deux of sorts occurs between violinist Keir GoGwilt and cellist Coleman Itzkoff, both of whom show marvelous instincts. They animate Carolyn Chen’s score – folky, rumbly, always resonant – with aplomb, their bows sweeping and bobbing as if dancers themselves. A few times, I closed my eyes and allowed the music to seduce me with its bittersweet secrets.
I burned out early in How to Fall Apart, its math not adding up. I wanted fewer vignettes. I wanted fewer stories and trivia points. (Did you know ants count their steps? You will after this, and more, too.) I wanted less arbitrariness in the flow of the chapters, not a through-line but an organic unspooling where the seams didn’t show between the sections.
I got everything I wanted in the last passage.
A disco ball descends from the ceiling, throwing off milky blips that cascade over the stage. A pool of light illuminates the dancers, who propel the disco ball into a demonstration of Newtonian physics. The trio dives and dodges, fitting their bodies around and away from the swinging ball. It is searingly beautiful.
Then, they lie on their backs and contemplate the stars, bringing us full circle. They’ve joined the many millennia of individuals who’ve sought meaning from and found answers in the dazzling scenery above. Will thousands more be around to do the same?
