Review: Dancing (not Posing) on Trajal Harrell’s Runway

NEW YORK — Trajal Harrell can turn a stage into a living, breathing painting, just once removed from a runway show. Like a garment, his latest work, “Caen Amour,” is two-sided: visible from the front and the back. As performers glide past silkily, awkwardly or fiercely — all the while teetering on their toes as if they were in heels in a fashion show — they wear and carry costumes, from ordinary scraps of fabric draped to couture perfection to a fantastically voluminous black ruffled dress by the Japanese label Comme des Garçons.

Costumes are integral to Harrell’s work: They become frames for his dancers and, by extension, for the dance itself. His past work includes a glittering series looking at the relationship between Harlem vogue balls and postmodern dance. Now, in “Caen Amour,” performed Tuesday at the Kitchen — a presentation with the Crossing the Line Festival — he takes another dive into what he refers to as “the historical imagination” to explore the connection between hoochie coochie shows and early modern dance. He was inspired, he says in press notes, by Middle Eastern belly dancer Little Egypt at the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair.

Harrell investigates the cultural appropriation and Orientalism that an early modern choreographer like Ruth St. Denis embraced and marketed throughout the world. Where did hoochie coochie stop and modern dance begin? You get the sense that Harrell wants to expose modern dance’s dirtiest secret. And if this sounds like a lot to unpack, “Caen Amour” is too theatrical to be stalled by its themes.

Each time the cast — Harrell, Thibault Lac, Perle Palombe and Ondrej Vidlar — emerge through a doorway and exit around the bend to model another look, they transform into different characters with different emotions: sensual, mournful, excited.

At one point, you are given the go-ahead to follow their path, if you wish, and to watch “Caen Amour” from another angle. This side of Harrell and Jean-Stephan Kiss’ set is their dressing room and backstage area, packed with piles of fabric, magazines and books, Windex (for the mirror) and boxes of tissues and cereal. (The front looks like a Greek island home, but blue instead of white.)

Here, the costume changes are choreographed yet happen so fast that you can glimpse panic in the dancers’ eyes. There are rules, explained early on by a young woman in the audience. (She appeared out of nowhere.) Audience members are welcome to drink airplane-size bottles of alcohol — it is something of a hoochie coochie show, after all — but they can’t touch the dancers. The riveting Palombe, who is nude a good deal of the time, exposes the seedy underbelly of hoochie coochie — or at least that is what it felt like watching men sipping miniature bottles of rum watching her.

As usual with Harrell’s work, there are numerous footnotes onstage, from vogueing to the dancer La Argentina — the Argentine-born Spanish dancer who inspired the Japanese Butoh dancer Kazuo Ohno — and the renegade spirit of Rei Kawakubo, the designer behind Comme des Garçons. In “Caen Amour,” they are stitched together with care by Harrell, a choreographer with enough design sensibility to breathe new life into history.