Review: Tere O’Connor’s ‘Long Run,’ a Dance All About Dance

NEW YORK — The dances of Tere O’Connor are for connoisseurs. “Long Run” (2017), a 70-minute creation that had its New York City premiere in a two-night engagement beginning Friday at NYU Skirball, abounds with compositional felicities and a wide range of dance textures.

Its eight dancers — five men and three women, each dressed differently — are barefoot. The best known of them is Silas Riener, who danced with Merce Cunningham’s company in 2007-2011, but all the others — Simon Courchel, Marc Crousillat, Eleanor Hullihan, Emma Judkins, Joey Loto, Lee Serle and Jin Ju Song-Begin — are skilled, unaffected performers who continue to demonstrate further dance resources as “Long Run” develops. (Nothing about the opening sections leads you to expect the amount of jumping you see later.)

These performers move in solos or in ensembles of different sizes, to music, without music or regardless of music. Separate parts of the body are combined with contrasting effects. You’re made aware how many elements there are to an arm, a leg, a foot, the spine. You never know where “Long Run” is going.

Its world, however, is neatly harmonious. O’ Connor knows any number of ways to subdivide his eight dancers: to have four different things happens at the same time is no trouble to him. He doesn’t, however, show us different things happening irrespective of one another. Everything seems connected, part of the same intricate organism.

O’Connor, as a program essay by dancer-choreographer Rashaun Mitchell informs us, reached 60 this year. My first experience of his work was 30 years ago; I’m sorry to have missed much of it since then. But it’s long been evident that his main subject is dance itself.

As I see O’Connor’s pieces, though, dance is their only subject. Some choreographers make intensely formal work that seems to turn into drama or music or meaning before our eyes: It may be hard to explain how this particular pattern or step becomes a window onto something beyond dance, but we feel it with wonder. Not so with O’Connor. “Long Run” shows us these structures, these phrases, these details; if you’re interested, they’re interesting.

It includes gestures and actions we can recognize from the wider world, but in a way that isolates their intrinsic qualities, as if they were scientific specimens. Like many dances today, it makes gender itself ambiguous: Same-sex and opposite-sex partnering coexist, without dramatic tension.

Mitchell’s essay, however, speaks of how some O’Connor choreography expresses “the code-switching and psychic space of queer existence.” I hope to see that when I next watch an O’Connor dance. Decades ago, many pieces by George Balanchine and Merce Cunningham seemed windowless worlds to many observers, and still do to some; the meanings of O’Connor’s work may yet happen to me. So far, I admire without being drawn in.