‘PURE’ Abducts Audiences into a Lo-Fi, High Intimacy Journey to Nowhere (Review)
Remarkable DIY tools and skilled guides create a visually compelling, tactile experience


Disclosure: PURE cast member Allie Marotta is a contributor to No Proscenium. She has not had editorial input, nor has she been privy to the contents of this review before publication.
When I was a kid, my bedroom door looked out through the kitchen, down a short hallway, and into the living room. If I leaned out of my bed at just the right angle I could watch TV after bedtime. One night my pop watched some sort of documentary on alien abduction. This wasn’t some sort of philosophical Whitley Strieber exploration of our alien friends, this was a scary re-creation of night terrors made real. My prime childhood fear transformed from run-of-the-mill Cold War nuclear holocaust anxiety to an intense terror of being abducted by aliens.
Christian Bakalov’s PURE, Part of the DramaLeague’s Directorfest, brought up a lot of those old alien abduction fears, which is good, because being scared is probably better than being bored. The technical creativity and the kind stewardship of the guides in PURE were elegant in their deployment of magical imagery and tender human contact, but it was hard for me to find enduring meaning in the piece.
PURE begins with a warm welcome to the Main Stage at LaGuardia Performing Arts Center at LaGuardia Community College. A woman hands me a consent form that gave me the opportunity to accept the various things PURE would involve: darkness, blindfolds, touching, flashing lights. As she watches me read through the consent form, she says “If you’d like, I can show you where the touching will happen, to inform your decisions on consent.” I smile and sign the document, feeling particularly taken care of.

When my turn comes up, a young woman introduces herself as my guide. She has a calm reserve about her, assured but kind. She takes me to a broad hallway and hands me headphones attached to a quaint old iPod. Zero-beat space music plays over the headphones. After a few minutes of spacey reflection my guide blindfolds me and leads me on a walk into darkness.
We come to a stop. I get the sense that I’m in a smaller space now. Then the touching begins. First I feel a hand on my cheek, then my forehead, then my neck, my arms, my chest, my shoulders. I don’t have the presence of mind to count up the hands, but I feel surrounded by people, each of them focused entirely on my body. There is nothing awkward or sexual about it. It feels almost detached, as if the intimacy is not coming from a group of individuals, but from a collective, as if I’m being held closely by singular creature with multiple minds. That’s about where the thoughts about aliens begin. This is an alien intimacy, but an intimacy nonetheless.
The hands recede into silent darkness, and my guide (or who I think is my guide) takes me further into the experience. She takes me through various spaces, blindfolded and not blindfolded. When not blindfolded we are always in near or complete darkness in rooms outlined by glowing spheres or lines or amorphous hanging shapes. Often, when not blindfolded, my vision is restricted by what feels like a cardboard apparatus that makes everything I’m looking at seem far small and far away.
Get Zay Amsbury’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
SubscribeSubscribe
In one astonishing sequence my guide affixes a visor to my face. You can see in the photo above how DIY lo-fi these things are, but the effect is astonishing. My guide puts me ahead of her and gives me a gentle push that I know now means “walk forward.” And then she lets me go. I trust her at that point, so I just keep walking. I find myself in a deep forest of shimmering vertical rainbows that stretches out forever in every direction. I am lost and safe. I am astonished and calmed. It is intensely beautiful. I want it to go on forever. And I have no idea what it means.

Christian Bakalov, the creator and director of PURE, is a graduate of the Ballet School of the Sophia Opera House, and spent much of his life as a dancer. This makes sense. The role the audience plays in PURE is one of a dancer rather than an actor or observer. At more than a few points in the piece the hands touching me moved my body into various shapes, choreographing me in real-time. The meaning of PURE must come from movement rather than narrative, from form rather than content, and from images rather than words, but these images never quite came together.
In what feels like a climax for the piece, an amorphous shape reaches out to me from the darkness. It seems alive, and somehow its inability to make contact makes it seem all the more real. In darkness, the hands can touch and intimacy is allowed. But when we can see the creature, the alien itself, the true other, we are denied the touch that might offer understanding. If anything it is that contrast between intimacy and loneliness when it comes to touch, and the contrast between emptiness and meaning when it comes to image that seems to hint at the mysteries hiding within PURE.

The guides in PURE are central to the experience. I’m pretty sure that my guide was with me through the whole experience. She was conscientious, kind, and skillful at letting me know non-verbally where she wanted me to go, and when blindfolded, everything went very well. Non-blindfolded moments involve long eye contact and more touching, and while I never feel uncomfortable, these moments lack the specificity and direction that a more seasoned immersive performer may have been able to provide. Touch and eye contact are not the same thing as content. Without a keen eye to the context of these intimate moments, the intimacy itself overwhelms whatever meaning the piece intended, and I’m left with a nice moment of contact with a stranger, but nothing that adds to the overall experience.
PURE landed for me as a journey without context, punctuated by intensely beautiful moments created through imaginative, lo-fi tools. At its best ‘PURE’ offers surprising DIY beauty and intense moments of intimacy through touch. For me, if nothing else, it excavated and exorcised some of my old alien phobias, but it didn’t quite replace them with something new.
PURE has concluded its run in NYC.
NoPro is a labor of love made possible by our generous Patreon backers. Join them today!
In addition to the No Proscenium web site, our podcast, and our newsletters, you can find NoPro on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, in the Facebook community Everything Immersive, and on our Slack forum.
Office facilities provided by Thymele Arts, in Los Angeles, CA.