Gia Kourlas, NY Times - April 24, 2009

When audience members sit down to watch a dance, there is a moment of expectation. What follows swiftly, no matter the level of expertise in the room, is judgment. On Wednesday night, Juliana F. May cleverly shifted that dynamic at the Chocolate Factory, where her newest work, "Discrete Body Dilemma," was being performed.

The audience, arranged in two rows with a stage in between, received instructions. A blackout was a signal to stand. As the space was gradually illuminated, those attending mimicked the dancers' methodical heel-to-toe steps and swapped places with the person opposite.

The exercise engendered an un-self-conscious communal hush. By engaging in this "do-si-do" (as the action was described beforehand by an usher), the ambience of the performance space, softly lighted by Chloe Z. Brown and featuring a droning electronic score by Seth Garrison and Clara Latham, was at once defused and charged.

When the bodies onstage dwindled to four, the dancers Anna Carapetyan, Nicole Mannarino, Eleanor Smith and Maggie Thom slowly turned in profile, their movement awkward and discrete at first, and later fused with powerful unison insistence.

Wearing an athletic uniform of sneakers, pants and shirts that displayed feminine curves, they performed repetitive, angular phrases in which movement rippled out from a tucked or arched pelvis to accentuate flexed heels or the sharpness of pointed elbows held overhead in two-dimensional diamond shapes.

Ms. Thom, striking in moments of stillness, fixed her gaze on Ms. Smith, as Ms. Carapetyan and Ms. Mannarino (a penetrating, precise dancer) performed a slow adagio of statuesque poses in the center.

They used their own voices to build upon Mr. Garrison and Ms. Latham's melodic waves of sound, which enriched the atmosphere at times and broke it harshly at others. There were moments when the connections between dancers, however purposely tenuous, read too vaguely, or when transitions between sections were forced. Yet in this rigorous juxtaposition, Ms. May created a distinct place for feeling and form to meet, as if distilled into a single sensation.

Roslyn Sulcas, NY Times - April 10, 2009

"Just wanted to say you are all going to die at some point," Arturo Vidich begins conversationally at the start of "Domestic Partner," a terrific double-act performance piece with Aki Sasamoto that opened at the Chocolate Factory on Wednesday night.

As opening lines go, it's rather arresting. And Mr. Vidich doesn't disappoint as his monologue on death, genetics and scientific research into aging gradually mutates into incoherence, and then into a twisting, jerking, convulsive solo that seems to embody every thought he has offered about the ineluctable, biologically determined will of the body.

The setting of "Domestic Partner" is worth a visit in its own right. The whitewashed, bare rectangular space of the Chocolate Factory is dotted with sculptural objects that turn the everyday into something stranger. An armoire contains a cage made from a wire hanger, string and clothespins. A deconstructed stool hangs in the center, its legs apparently unraveling. A large slanted screen flashes disconnected images (and sometimes real-time film) at one side, while odd protuberances and a shed behind it suggest a minicity or habitation of some sort.

No credits are offered for the set, but the slanted screen construction seems to belong to Mr. Vidich; the domestic appurtenances to Ms. Sasamoto. Visually, the elements work together seamlessly, as do the performers, who, according to the program, are offering coexisting solos.

After Mr. Vidich opens a door on the screen facade and crawls inside, Ms. Sasamoto (already seen moving slowly around the room, holding a small television) emerges from the chest of drawers. Her subsequent actions continue to transform the quotidian into the bizarre, most notably when she stands on a table and chops up peeled grapefruit with her frighteningly bladed shoes.

The effect is gruesome and very funny, and this combination permeates the entire piece, which ends after Mr. Vidich has traveled round the room in his little shed, poking a rusty saw through its wooden slats. (The audience, seated or standing along the walls, frequently has to move out of the way of such menaces.)

These mini-meditations on death and daily life, what we know and what is forever mysterious (which, Ms. Sasamoto explains, includes the equation X x Y = 1), feel both arbitrary yet somehow inevitable. Aha: art.

Claudia La Rocco, NY Times - March 30, 2009

As antiseptic theaters proliferate in New York, the idiosyncrasies of character-rich places grow increasingly pleasurable. On Saturday night "[ ]," a new dance-theater work by Red Metal Mailbox, took advantage of the quirks of the Chocolate Factory, a multidisciplinary treasure of a theater in Long Island City, Queens.

Chloe Z. Brown bathed the white-painted brick space in shifting fields of light, sometimes bringing into stark relief its rough, industrial edges and sometimes flooding it in a mellow haze, as in one fabulously strange site-specific moment when an army of paper airplanes flew up through a shaftway to scud across the bare floor.

The performers, Jillian Sweeney and Rachel Tiemann, watched from their perch on the sill of the theater's big metal sliding door. The audience, seated at the far end of the rectangular room, first saw them peering through a hole cut in the center of that door. Ms. Tiemann then awkwardly maneuvered her body halfway through the hole, only to have Ms. Sweeney brusquely slide the door open far enough to step calmly through.

From the beginning of this 40-minute work, written and directed by Sarah Maxfield, these two competed to upstage each other. In one delicious section a frustrated Ms. Sweeney resorted to rapid, stiff-limbed circuits around the space, compulsively tracing its contours and momentarily flummoxing her companion.

Despite their overtly obnoxious methods (talking over each other, invading personal space, even shoving), the performance itself relied on a delicate structure of skits, using non sequiturs and subtle mood adjustments to move it along. This delicacy was at odds with an overly heavy governing concept: throughout, the women vied to remember better a third, mysterious woman, whose importance remained rather too cutely vague and artificial.

This is a pity, as it sometimes bogged down the more engaging moments of nuanced play between them. (Ms. Sweeney made particularly good use of small facial and posture shifts.) As proved by the title, capturing an absence is a tricky thing.

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