Park Avenue Armory, New York, NY.
September 10, 2024.
What happens when you take club dancing, turn it into choreography, and then put it back in a club you created exclusively for the performance? For the NYC audiences lucky enough to snag a ticket to R.O.S.E. by Sharon Eyal + Gai Behar at the Park Ave Armory, it was a journey of discovery, uncovering layers of professional dance, pedestrian dance, wonder, inclusivity, music and lights. It was nothing like I’d seen before. It was…a vibe.
The Park Avenue Armory is a grand building used for a variety of performances, utilizing its vastness to offer performance spaces of atypical capacity. For this show, guests enter through a wall of heavy velvet curtains (after covering phone camera lenses with custom stickers to enforce a strict rule against photography), and find themselves in a proper club with fog, lights and the pulsing music of DJ Ben UFO. The show started at 7:30pm, but no dancers appeared until 8:15pm. That is, unless you count the audience as dancers – which you should, since ’90s club dancing is the inspiration for this work, and because the sold-out audience was, in fact, dancing.
Clearly, the best way to consume this work was to immediately immerse oneself into the scene, and this writer quickly jumped into her 18-year-old self’s dream of being a ’90s European club kid instead of a ballet student in a small town in New England. I wasn’t alone in this approach. When the professional dancers did enter the space, they did so quietly as the music and lights changed a bit, with many people unaware of the change until the dancers were upon them.
The artists wore nude colored, lace costumes with ornate makeup and snaked expressionless through the crowd, almost alien-like in tone. Eyal spent many years dancing for Batsheva Dance Company and the Gaga influence of the company permeates her movement in its curious and seamless qualities.
As the night wore on, the audience was more performative with the experience, whether continuing to bop and move as the dancers performed, or clamoring through the dark when the tell-tale sign of the performers entering the space occurred – an undeniable perfume that preceded each entrance. The rules of decorum slipped away with each minute, and by the end, some audience members sat on the floor, slapping it with their hands.
Everyone will have their own experience with this show. Being tall is a massive advantage, as trying to watch dance from six rows deep of people if you are short is impossible. Others have written about parts to this show I couldn’t see at all, and that aspect was frustrating – having to choose between fighting for a spot or being fully shut out. In that sense, observing human behavior was fascinating to watch, but left me wondering if I should leave since I couldn’t see anything. In the end, I found myself perfectly situated to see the final number, just by chance. The finale was a beautiful amalgamation of the dancers and the audience with energy flowing between the two powerfully, respectfully, and honoring the curiosity that is human movement.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
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