Sol niger  / Dance View

Vol 24, No 4, Autumn 2007
By Rita Felciano

Keith Hennessy & Sol niger

     For the latest of his dance theater works Sol niger (September 21, Theater Artaud), Hennessy employed dance in a way he has not in several years. Sol is one of his finest achievements not because of the presence of dance but because he so effectively took advantage of dance’s capacity to express emotional truths that can sound obvious when put into words.
    Sol got its name from the Latin for solar eclipse (black sun); it suggests that the times we live in are so dark that the only way to look at them is from the shadows. The work’s rough edged vitality brought to mind the traveling actors of Ingmar Bergman “The Seventh Seal” who also were on the road during a time of pestilence. The communal dances - i.e. a clapping dance performed upright, a fierce stamping one while sitting, an exuberant rolling flipping one - suggested the body as a locus for healing and community.
    Sol is put together as a series of circus acts turned inside out. Dancers stacking on top of each other looked like clowns until you heard that two-thirds of the world’s children don’t have a bed of their own. You couldn’t forget the list of miseries projected on a punching bag when it got pummeled and shoved around. Hennessy’s master of ceremony rattled off a list of injustices with the speed of an auctioneer trying to make a sale. The inimitable Seth Eisen was both an old crone and as innocent as the “babies” he tried to alchemize. When he ceremoniously started to stick knives into them, we stopped smiling. The brilliant Sean Feit performed his (mostly live) score on and inside the piano with breathtaking ferocity and tenderness.
    Most interesting was the trapeze work on slack ropes by two very different artists, Emily Leap and Brett Womack. What they did was technically impressive; how they did it wrenched your soul. Hanging, falling and struggling, they embodied vulnerability and courage. The fact that throughout the evening, these clowns often donned black hoods suggested a world of anonymous evil far removed from the antics that glistened on Sol’s surface.
    Moving from high jinx to desperation, from poignancy to anguish, the seventy-minute show was an emotional roller coaster that informed, infuriated and inspired. Sol didn’t shout its anger but you couldn’t miss it. This was activist art that worked - as art and as a call for action.