Liss Fain’s End Point and Open Time are dances about space—exterior, interior, personal, public—and the relationships between them: between dancers, dancers and audience, audience and dancers, and audience with audience. Few site-specific dances or dance installations have managed audience inclusion with such grace, making viewers a significant but unobtrusive part of both the installation and choreography. The result is an immersive, multi-sensory experience that draws audiences into a world of movement, light, sound, and shifting spatial perception.
Beginning with End Point, the audience faced away from Matthew Antaky’s translucent installation in the center of the room, watching soloists move in each of the four corners of the performance space. Draped in Mary Domenico’s steel-blue slip dresses, the dancers first appeared like Caryatids—the Greek women holding up temple roofs in classical architecture. Their long, wavy hair also hark back to this classical period, while their dresses echoed the glass-blue and steel hues of both Antaky’s installation and lighting design.
Dan Wool’s percussive score animated the dance, initially sounding like a riff from Peter Gabriel’s “Biko,” with its steady, rhythmic beat and urgent delivery, until each dancer moved solo along one length of the room. Shorter in duration, End Point served as an abstract prequel to Open Time, which unfolded within a house-like frame of translucent rooms, suspended window frames, wire-mesh walls, and narrow passageways. The audience voyeuristically stole glimpses of movement, witnessed the entire set from outside the installation, or passed dancers in intimate proximity. The set framed the audience as much as the dancers, who in turn framed the set—always a vital part of the staging, choreography, and even the wardrobe, as the audience’s drab clothing contrasted like shadows against the satin ice-blue dresses of the performers.
Watching Open Time—as dancers shared duets in one room, overwhelmed another with all four in the same space, or held a développé alone in a room to themselves—was like looking through a house: out one window, through a neighbor’s window, and into their room, where only fragments of movement are visible, and where lighting, scale, and sightlines determine how much is seen. The audience never experienced the performance in its entirety—only closet-like close-ups or front-yard views—always chasing the dance, relocating, moving with it, or being gently evicted by other viewers vying for space as the choreography kept shifting rooms without a particular arch.
Open Time is a perfect interactive collaboration: a fluid convergence of Liss Fain’s choreographic intelligence with dancers—Liavanna Maislen, Elena Martins, Katherine Neumann, and Isabel Rosenstock—set against the architectural choreography of Antaky’s lighting and spatial design, with his uncanny understanding of pedestrian patterns and rhythms. Wool’s driven score, with text excerpts by poet Louise Glück, and Domenico’s costuming served as essential layers and complements. And kudos to the motley audience—equal parts curious and reverent—who moved with surprising, unrehearsed elegance and took photographs in restrained fashion.
“You’ve got to get me out of here.
Six weeks sitting in a two-room apartment with nothing to do
but look out the window at the neighbors…”
— Rear Window
