XSIGHT! PERFORMANCE GROUP
It helped that Xsight members know how to get in and out fast; they don’t carry much excess baggage. The seven dances took just a little more than an hour to perform. Of those seven, three were taken from Xsight’s performance last spring, “All You Can Eat and Other Human Weaknesses”; a fourth, Sudden Summer, is arguably the precursor of a leather-bar trio that appeared in “All You Can Eat.” (Xsight dropped the TV-spy-show thread that supposedly linked the segments of “All You Can Eat”; so much the better, though I must admit I missed the rubber turkey.)
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Xsight is gifted–abundantly and in about equal parts–with humor, an opennness to raw aggression, and sexual tension. Its three members–Brian Jeffery, Timothy O’Slynne, and Mary Ward, all award-winning dance artists–form not just any old threesome but a peculiarly volatile romantic triangle (though “romance” is too nice a word in this context). The apparently shifting loyalties in Xsight create a sense of both claustrophobia and centrifugal force–they threaten to fly apart at every moment. It’s a sense so innately dramatic that we can watch these three work through the same personal dynamics over and over again, in various guises, and not be bored.
Tormento’s humor is more conventional. Ward plays the heroine, stylishly cool and retro in her skintight leopard-skin tunic and short skirt, harassed by faithless lovers, a boring job, a compulsion to eat and drink, and advancing age. Though Ward’s comic gifts are considerable, Tormento finally degenerates into a cartoonish maelstrom, characters and objects flying wildly around the stage.
Ward is the ostensible object of desire, and her lascivious laugh at the end seems to say this is her fantasy. But her passivity throughout sometimes makes her seem merely the conduit between the two men: she’s rolled between them, carted like a sacrificial lamb by one man and delivered to the other, and, after she seems to swoon, is dragged across the floor in turn by the two men. Other images, however, imply parity and an idyllic unity: each dancer lays a head on the shoulder of another, the three forming a circle; their glances flit from one to another as easily and serenely as birds.
