Finding a place on stage for her longstanding use of video in her career,
Tharp puts a video camera and cameraoperator on stage as part of her cast of
eight performers (seven dancers and one dancer acting as cameraoperator).
Defining her choreographic interest here for scrutinizing the dynamics of
violent movement and violent expression, Tharp takes things to conscious
extremes. She has defined her work as being "void of moral content" while
acknowledging "nature's darker forces." Between dance action and
simultaneously projected video images, the grimly colored stage and
grotesquely wrapped dancers, described by one critic as being in "leprous
rags," reveal grotesque expressions, often magnified in distorted close-ups
marked by gaping mouths, contorted limbs, and thrown-back heads. In Tharp's
personal chronology, the woman grotesquely victimized in the momentum of Bad
Smells showed the ultimate destruction of an individual hinted at in the
"sub-text" of Short Stories [see same]. Branca's aggressively abrasive music
provides Tharp's topsy turvy, implosions and entanglements with a perfectly
apt mirror, in this case a willfully shattered one.