BY ELIZABETH ZIMMER | Making art out of human bodies has always posed a challenge. Dancers are, after all, forked animals just like the rest of us; and arrive onstage loaded with more baggage than do musical notes, splotches of paint, chunks of stone, or even words.

Tere O’Connor is a contemporary master of this challenge, a rigorous thinker and a fearless choreographer now in his 40th year of making dances. His new Rivulets, at just under an hour, includes a collage score of his own devising, gorgeous costumes by Reid Barthelme, and effective lighting by Michael O’Connor, his brother. In preparation for many months since mid-pandemic, it comes to life in the hands and extremely articulate bare feet of a diverse cast including Leslie Cuyjet, Tess Dworman, Wendell Gray II, Emma Judkins, Jordan Demetrius Lloyd, Jordan Morley, Mac Twining, and Jessie Young.

Listening to Tere talk, which he loves to do, is at least as interesting as watching his choreography; a hourlong Zoom meditation he recorded on June 28 2021 for Danspace Project, co-presenter of this season, is available online and well worth your attention (to view it, click here).

The Howard Gilman Performance Space at Baryshnikov Arts Center has been rearranged for this two-week run so the eight dancers occupy the middle, with a few long rows of watchers on two sides. Benches on the two end walls allow a dramatic opening tableau, the seated performers facing away from the viewers, two on a bench, and the others draped on the floor, arrayed in a heap in a comfortable, companionable pose. One by one they rise, moving into the central space, twirling alone. A few carve curving paths through the room with extended hands. They meet and part—pawing the ground, like horses, with their feet.

A longtime ballet teacher, O’Connor is now in the vanguard of contemporary dance artists, but ballet vocabulary undergirds his powerful designs in space. The dancers execute little stag leaps, turn in arabesque, move through the room on half-toe like kids pretending to wear high heels. Sometimes they just stand still.

Even as what they do is mostly non-representational—they don’t pretend to be anyone or anywhere else—their patterns and formations seem to proceed from centuries ago, from a medieval or baroque fresco. The blending of costume color and lighting design supports this impression. O’Connor’s score uses both simple and extremely complex rhythmic patterns. The performers treat one another with reverence, make circles reminiscent of May Day rituals, and signal to one another across a void, enmeshed in some kind of extremity. They cluster, lowering Dworman to the ground and protecting her. They assemble in the center of the space, in a sort of diamond formation, moving in unison from side to side.

O’Connor trained as an actor at SUNY Purchase before turning to choreography; he embraced dancing relatively late and as a result takes the structure of ballet, if not the frou-frou that often accompanies it, very seriously. He’s interested, he declared in the Zoom last summer, in “the language, the systems, the math,” in “dance as a hallucination about architecture.” His contributions to the form are small and lapidary, assembled from personal ideas.

His new piece is like history or the weather—inevitable, serious, deeply etched in time and space. All the seats for this world premiere run of Rivulets are sold out, but a wait list will begin at the box office one hour prior to showtime on the day of each performance.

Baryshnikov Arts Center presents Tere O’Connor’s Rivulets, co-commissioned by Danspace Project: Fri./Sat. Dec. 9, 10 and Wed.-Sat., Dec. 14-17 at 7:30pm at Howard Gilman Performance Space, Baryshnikov Arts Center (450 W. 37th St. btw. Ninth & 10th Aves.). For tickets ($25), click here.

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