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Sam Kim/Luciana Achugar Review
by Nicholas Feitel

Modern dance found cause for both solace and woe recently in the dual performance of Sam Kim's Nobody Understands Me and Luciana Achugar's A Super-Natural Return to Love. Both pieces played recently at Dance Theater Workshop, and were ironic in their symbolism, respectively, of what modern dance should and should not aspire to in its quest for change and self-expression.

In Nobody Understands Me, a production with only three main dancer/characters, including the central focus of the piece, Ms. Kim herself, self-expression and recollection is heavily encouraged, as well as a plethora of Duran Duran. With not much for backdrop or set except for a flashy silver-plastic curtain that looked, in contrast to the music, vaguely 70's, Ms. Kim forces the eyes of her audience on to her and the not-quite-method in the madness of her movement. Ms. Kim and the other two dancers, positioned around various points in the fore and background of the stage, attempt through their significantly varying movements to self-express and contrast with each other ,a point underscored by a chorus of campy-wig-blond 80's girls who pop up once or twice from behind the disco-ball curtain. By the end of the piece, the audience is left somewhat baffled, but positively so. Through the 80's pop-modern music and Ms. Kim's Joey Ramone/Pinball Wizard stylings, the audience is made to relive in our minds if not the 80's, then a time when each audience member has wanted to break away to the beat of their own figurative drummer and defy the horde of wig-blond ladies who threaten with their conformity. The inherent irony or joke of the piece is that by the end of it the audience understands and sympathizes with Ms. Kim's sentiments all too well, but the question begs each audience member: Does anyone understand me?

By contrast the central message of Luciana Achugar's A Super-Natural Return to Love seems not to be the mindful self-indulgence of Ms. Kim's piece, but a focus on womanhood as a whole and an eerie sort of collectivization that would attempt to entangle the audience into a particular form of thought. In Ms. Achugar's piece, women are attired and made up to appear vastly similar and dark. They wander aimlessly throughout the stage, spreading what appears to be blood from pouches near their waists on each other and on the wall, where there is no set other than a painting space. There is only one way such activity can be described and the word is an awkward one: vaginal. As more women fill the stage (the piece contains no male dancers), they begin to grind against each other in a manner than becomes repetitive to all but the straightest of the men or the kinkiest of the women in the audience. Ms. Achugar's point seems to have in its ideals a mention of the projection of womanhood: that womanhood is some sort of a cult, causing these women to spew their lifeblood onto the wall in vain and very eventually, onto other women. However, unfortunately, the point is often lost amidst endless girl-on-girl contact and the excessive amounts of fake blood. In the end, although the audience may or may not comprehend that love and womanhood is an experience that causes you to expose yourself, to paint your "blood" on everything, they are desensitized to it, which while that may or may not be Ms. Achugar's point is certainly a point for consternation.

It is important to note that since Ms. Kim and Ms. Achugar were the choreographers, the inventor/creators of the pieces that were shown, that their influences as such were used to vastly different effects. While Ms. Achugar's piece tried to instill through repetition and visual imagery the choreographer's point, the audience was ultimately bored by hearing what Ms. Achugar had to say. However, what did work was when Ms. Kim, while instilling her own point of view in the audience, managed to make the audience find a personal meaning in her work, a connection that allowed the audience to dwell on Ms. Kim's piece and to take it with them as they left Dance Theater Workshop that day. If Ms. Kim and Ms. Achugar's form of modern dance aims to be a method of self-expression, as it would seem from their work, then as Ms. Kim has realized and Ms. Achugar has so sadly not, in order for others to understand the work, you must also make them understand themselves.