Photo: Oscar Sol

Two shows I saw in one weekend last November harmonized in a way that elevated both. One was a solo visual art exhibition (Bill Viola’s Bodies of Light at James Cohan Gallery), the other a theater piece (Temporary Distortion’s J-horror-via-early-Egoyan chamber performance Americana Kamikaze at PS 122). When they met in my mind, it was love at first Zeitgeist. Troika Ranch’s loopdiver belatedly completes the set with a dance counterpart; as I watched it Thursday night at the Dance Center, the three engaged in a cold ménage à trois sharply cognizant of our cultural moment.

Three mechanical set pieces created by Colin Kilian hang just a few inches off the floor during loopdiver, demanding far more real estate—center stage, no less—than is typical in dance work. They’re approximately the size of king mattresses and contain Heatherwicky metallic sunbursts. The set cleaves the floor in half, which Troika Ranch does also to the audience: Three full rows sit onstage opposite the house such that we regard our fellow dancegoers, when able, through Kilian’s robotic boxes. (When solarized video is projected upon their threadbare steel mesh panels, their sudden opacity recalls the pristinely-finished, high-resolution screens that display Viola’s Bodies. Lit from behind, however, the massive triptych nearly disappears.)

Americana Kamikaze’s two couples stand on phone booth-sized balconies hung just a few inches off the floor and speak directly into the light that illuminates their faces. Their interlocking, absurdist narratives are delivered in a most unhelpful sequence: There is no “a-ha” moment, even at the performance’s end—Temporary Distortion asks you to take the whole neatly-arranged mess with you and trust that, with enough gentle rattling by the experiences of subsequent days, all pegs will eventually find holes of complementary shape. Similarly, the same actions are visited upon the same bodies in Viola’s videos ad infinitum: An older woman is sprayed with hundreds of gallons of water while she stares directly into his camera. There are no variations in the cycle, it simply replays forever. Invisibly, though, progression is somehow occurring (in the viewer, of course).

loopdiver lasts five minutes, or it did until Dawn Stoppiello, Mark Coniglio and their diligent collaborators fed it through the digital pasta maker. What began as a brief, doughy mass of pedestrian, gesture-based source material has been extruded and entropized into a tangle of obsessively stuttering fragments of movement and text lasting just short of an hour. Troika Ranch’s dancers take literally thousands of minuscule steps, one going backward for each pair forward. Near the end, performer Johanna Levy breaks free and joins us in the house, singled out by a light pointed directly at her third row seat. She breathes a handful of words into a microphone in French. “Encore, déjà. Déjà, encore.” Again, already. Already, again. Coniglio’s score of distorted, distant piano and the knocking pipes of gigabit radiators is the placid yet firm dictator of all action: loopdiver’s six dancers keep whatever time it tells, moving to match its irregular rhythms, traveling as far along their predetermined tracks as each gap between percussion allows. Reverse and repeat. Pause, blackout and reset. Repeat. Encore, déjà. Déjà, encore.

My boyfriend has a tattoo on his arm that’s nearly finished after four sittings. He’s having the photograph of Candy Darling that graces The Smiths’s Sheila Take a Bow recreated on his bicep at a resolution that reduces it to a field of 784 variably-shaded squares. Photoshop generated the image in less than a second; this subdermal recreation has taken over twenty hours so far. (An artist who’s done wonderful work elsewhere on my boyfriend’s body couldn’t pull it off—a second is finishing the job.) The world of information flourishes by easy reproduction, data crawling like kudzu over any surface that doesn’t constantly slough it off. For a human, merely organizing one’s thoughts is a labyrinthine journey. These dancers’ analog copy of a digitally-shredded routine was brilliantly executed. What seldom and slight mistakes they made didn’t just reward close observation. They were the point.