Dancing On Fragile Threads Of Memory, ‘Like Real People Do’ (The NoPro Review)

Our present moment has left artists with precious few choices when it comes to the oppressive realities we face. You can either actively run from them, risking tone deafness, or you can embrace some aspect of the social and political upheaval and risk overloading your audience.

All options are held within this context. The tide of history having swept us all into its grasp for better or worse.

Linked Dance Theatre has opted to surf the wave of the pandemic, adapting their occasional series Like Real People Do into a video call based production that weds pre-recorded video with Zoom call conversations. In so doing, the team creates a play-within-a-play structure that leans into the few strengths of Zoom as a platform, portioning out the story beats across a series of four episodes that take about a week to play out in real time.

Linked’s forte is dance theatre — it’s in their name after all — and their reputation precedes them. I’ve been hearing about their work for years now from the NYC team — first Zay and then pretty much everyone else. Their speciality is site responsive dance, and their original plan for this Spring involved a short festival run adapting the Like Real People Do format to the grounds of the Pasadena Playhouse.

COVID-19 killed that timeline, but the creative team pivoted to create a tale of long distance relationships instead. Taking dance based immersive online is, to my imagination, just about the highest level of difficultly there could be. So much of what makes immersive dance work intriguing is in the manifestation of the distance between bodies, both the performers and the audience. Done well, it becomes a commentary not just on the relationships of the characters to each other, but on how space is a fluid medium through which we all move, bound to each other by invisible currents of motion.

Which is just not something you’re going to get out of a Zoom frame.

Yet the other part of Linked’s name is Theatre, and theatre implies drama: the narrative interplay of individual, usually unspoken, desires that lead to unexpected emotionally alchemical outcomes. And when it comes to bringing the drama, Linked Dance is no slouch.

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Ostensibly this is the story of Luke (Jordan Chlapecka)and Leo (Nicky Romaniello), two long distance lovers who have been separated by the virus. Their relationship is strained by the physical distance and we get to see this play out in their memories, which are catalogued by two branches of the mysterious Department which has oversight over human memories. One branch — The Department of Manhattan Memories — will be familiar to those who have caught LRPD in the Big Apple. The other — The Department of Pasadena Possibilities — has been created for this new show.

Luke and Leo’s memories are presented as files downloaded from The Department’s vast servers, the purpose for which is mischievously uncertain. Their interactions are heartfelt, and grounded in an unforced earnestness from Chlapecka and Romaniello that makes the moments when “memory modulations” — which take the realistic conversations into the realm of the surreal through editing tricks and expressionistic dance — occur have a weight that equally grounds them.

The frame around those memories has an initial air of whimsy. This is thanks to the performances from the DoMM’s Daphne Brooks (Rita McCann) and DoPP’s Cornelia Prue (Kendra Slack), who, while not seeming more different, both manage to feel like they hail from a bureaucratic fairy tale land tucked comfortably between the creations of Terry Gilliam and She Who Must Not Be Named. Yet like that genre of fantasy, there’s a melancholy shot through under the surface, and what starts as a framing device for pre-recorded material slowly takes center stage as the tale unfolds.

By nesting these tales together, Linked Dance overcomes the limitations of social distancing to make a story about social distancing that plays as many minor chords as it does major ones. In so doing, they create a piece that has real resonance with the pandemic’s moment without resorting to sheer obviousness: which manages to avoid the threat of empathy overload. Instead we end up with something bittersweet, whose aftertaste does not sour.

Devised before the newly reignited civil rights movement in the United States got into full swing, I played through the events of the story during the height of the protests. This had the effect of muting the emotional impact of the two stories, and yet the notes still came through despite my own attention being enraptured by the second wave of history to be stirred up by 2020. And while I felt a pang of guilt for turning away long enough to spend time in Linked’s world, what the team had created honors the global moment so well that at the end of the story’s cycle I only felt more grounded in the seeming contractions of the era.

How a universal experience is played out in astronomically specific ways. How the threads between us are fragile, and yet we ourselves can be so resilient.

It left me with a seed of hope for us all. Which these days is a lot to find.

Like Real People Do: Long Distance Relationships Division runs through July 19, with new instances starting weekly. The series costs $65, and includes four roughly half-hour episodes. All spots are currently full. New applications will be accepted starting at the end of July.

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