Flashing lights and optical tricks can’t save “Tree of Codes” from being a mess. The performance, choreographed by Wayne McGregor and featuring dancers from the Paris Opera Ballet and the Company Wayne McGregor, made its United States premiere on September 14 at the Park Avenue Armory, following its world premiere at the Manchester International Festival in July, to a standing ovation nonetheless. An audience is apparently willing to forgive a lot if you wow them with special effects.The overall construction felt scatterbrained, the result of too many ideas. Part of this can be chalked up to the source material. “Tree of Codes” is based on the book of the same name by Jonathan Safran Foer, a work of literary collage in which the author cut up the novel “The Street of Crocodiles” by Bruno Schulz and created his own narrative out of the fragments. Aside from the name, the performance appears to have only adapted a similar fragmentary stance toward its own source material, a commendable approach in many cases, but here it arrives at its loose structure with very little to prop it up or keep it moving. It travels from one environment to the next with no connection between the disparate pieces and nothing to make them feel part of a whole.Not that it doesn’t try. The artist Olafur Eliasson, credited for the “Visual Concept” of the performance, has created a massive, whirling stage of color that dancers move across, with different visual motifs that reappear. Audience members sit in bleacher seating at one end of the space; they face stage right, which is situated in the middle of the room. The performance opens with a lot of mystery: the room is in darkness as a group of dancers enter. We can’t see them but they have light bulbs attached to their bodies. They contort their limbs, sometimes alone and sometimes coming together in groups, looking like tangled Christmas lights. Later, the dancers parade across a shadowy stage, dressed in flesh-colored costumes. Behind the stage is a mirror that is constantly moving, or at least changing shape, and at different times during the performance the dancers perform behind various scrims that are dropped down from the ceiling. It’s unsettling, as if the dancers (and the audience, who can see themselves reflected in the mirrors at the back of the stage) are in a hall of mirrors one minute and a nightclub the next. But there are times when Eliasson’s environments feel flat, especially during the middle of the show when the lighting becomes bland, even harsh.The music is the main contributing factor to the nightclub experience, and was the best part of the performance even if it felt lacking in feeling at times. Jamie xx, the producer and member of the band The xx, composed the score. When the tempo increased, the dancers were visibly energized, their movements sharper and more directed. When it slowed down, the music felt less focused and the dancers followed suit. Long sections were devoid of energy, the soundtrack just a sprinkling of a detuned piano or an underwater, heavily processed vocal track that sounded like imitation Sigur Rós and was just as boring as the real thing.It would be easier to write-off “Tree of Codes” as a total failure if not for its few moments of brilliance, and the potential it obviously contains. The idea of putting McGregor, Eliasson, and Jamie xx together is inspired, and the mind runs wild with possibilities. Unfortunately, none of those possibilities pan out. Maybe Eliasson couldn’t do everything he wanted to do because of the need for the dancers to see each other and have some space, to secure their safety while performing? Maybe Jamie xx was required to produce a piece of music that, at times, worked against his strengths? Maybe McGregor was constrained by his collaborators? Either way, “Tree of Codes” in theory should work, but on stage in front of people it just doesn’t come together.
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