GALLIM
The Joyce Theater
New York, New York
November 15, 2024
WONDERLAND
Jerry Hochman
There’s this thing I have about Andrea Miller’s choreography. Of those pieces of hers that I’ve seen, all I could glean from them was sound and fury, and tears and sweat. Well, cut the tears. I couldn’t understand the fuss.
But I decided to give GALLIM and Miller, its Artistic Director, one more shot. Along comes WONDERLAND, and it was more of the same…until it wasn’t. And it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out.
Well…..
GALLIM in Andrea Miller’s “WONDERLAND”
Photo by Dan Chen
WONDERLAND is part hell, part hoot, part puzzle, and part reality that plays particularly well in this time and place. It’s about herd mentality, literally. But it’s also one of the finest visualized examples of collective consciousness and mass voluntary subjection that I’ve seen since Nazi propaganda filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will”…and Charlie Chaplin’s “The Great Dictator.” [A double-feature to end all double-features.] It’s not without flaws, but it says what it says in a radically different way. Wonderland is an important contribution to the discussion of how, and why, groups large or small act in what seems, to people not part of the group, to be irrational and/ or against their own interests. The subject has been tackled many times before, but, to my knowledge, never in this manner, or with such consequences. See it, or not, at your peril.
And that “puzzle” part? Figuring out what Miller is doing. It seems insoluble, until you get a few parts to fit together.
GALLIM in Andrea Miller’s “WONDERLAND”
Photo by Dan Chen
The piece begins strangely, but with Miller’s dances, that’s sort of a given. What follows is not a minute by minute blow by blow; it’s more of a synthesized synopsis, in as close to presentation order as I can get, with some commentary along the way.
Initially, the unmistakable sound of a herd of horses is piped through the theater’s speakers. The sounds are fast moving, like a race, or a stampede. [Either or both work, in hindsight, as metaphors.] There are other animal sounds as well, at the dance’s beginning and throughout, including, I think, cows, maybe lambs, and the chirp of a solitary bird. I’ll get back to the bird later.
As the dance focuses on the dancers, who have either slowly walked onto the stage or were there all along (I don’t recall), the dancers adopt their own horse gallops; the herd mimicking what they’ve heard…of the herd.
At the end of this period of animal sounds and movement (my autocorrect just changed “animal” to “anal”; that works too) a large group of dancers, primarily female to my recollection, gather upstage audience-right. Suddenly, they begin singing (mouthing) a remixed song from the Mickey Mouse Club.
Wait. What??
These ladies take seats on pyramiding steps (maybe provided by the backs of other dancers, bent over to support them) and feign hyper smiles and generalized glee as they replicate the song’s lyrics and the sense of community that went with it to all those watching on TV.
Later (I know I’m taking these songs out of performance sequence or order) there’s a piece of classical music, and another song – this time, “Mr. Sandman,” sung, as it was in the late fifties, by the Chordettes. There must be some point to all this, and there is — I’ll get to it later. [I just learned that the score for “The Great Dictator” was composed by Meredith Wilson, who later composed the score for the Broadway show/ film “The Music Man.” “The Music Man” would have worked here too.]
GALLIM in Andrea Miller’s “WONDERLAND”
Photo by Dan Chen
Central to all this are group gatherings, which are addressed by, and overtaken by, a highly persuasive and explosive figure identified in the program as Megalomatrix (portrayed at this performance by the remarkable Arika Yamada, whose electric performance convinced me that there must be something special to this piece. She’s an all-occasion leader, rabble-rouser, and would-be dictator who singlehandedly (well, with her nonstop arms too) motivates the human herd to do her bidding – visually imploring them to listen to her, to what she tells them, and to act upon it, even (and most definitely) by making war and killing people, including themselves. [At one point, the maddening sound of off-sync multiple drumming, at high decibels and with uncountable annoying “drum” beats per second, is heard over the theater speakers. It wasn’t what I thought it was as I watched the piece and heard the noise. As I realized in hindsight, the sound represented machine-gun fire.]
Megalomatrix (my definition: the model for a person who is obsessed with their own power) appears and reappears to lead the herd in response to a multitude of different developments. She’s a fascist for all seasons, persuading her minions, her lemmings, to follow her, for the greater good of…her.
There are other specified characters with different functions in the piece, but they’re more difficult to discern – at least to me. There’s a character titled “The Fool” (played by Vivian Pakkanen, whom I recall seeing on stage, but not in a fool-like way; another is labeled “The Guilty” (Georgia Usborne) whom I also recall seeing, but not being “guilty” of anything – though, if I have it right, feeling guilty about the path she followed). And there are specific characters titled “The Beloved” (played by Donterreo Culp), “The Jester” (by Bill Barry), “The Dog” (by Bryan Testa), “The Seer” (India Hobbs), and “The Everyone” (Nouhoum Koita), none of which I could identify by their identified names. It doesn’t matter.
In addition to these characters (when they’re not focal points) are the other members of “The Pack”: Jasmine Alisca, Victoria Chasse Dominguez, Briana Del Mundo, Waverly Fredericks, and Thomas Hogan.
GALLIM in Andrea Miller’s “WONDERLAND”
Photo by Dan Chen
While Megalomatrix is somewhat monolithic, The Guilty is far more complex a character (and, if I’ve identified her correctly from her program photo, not just by her distinctive costume). She’s one of The Pack. A follower, initially convinced of the righteousness of whatever cause or course of conduct that Megalomatrix may be preaching. But the piece, every so often, focuses on her. She questions – but she accepts. And although I don’t recall seeing it, she probably also convinces others – maybe a male friend (I don’t recall seeing anything that would indicate more than that, but it might have been there). But as things start going badly, she visually saddens, and becomes confused. Perhaps feeling guilty (“The Guilty”) for what she’s done.
During the course of the piece, every so often you hear the sound of a sniffle, or someone trying to hold back a tear (it’s unclear whether that’s piped in or live, but I think it’s the latter). In one penultimate scene, when Usborne’s character sees the body of her friend/lover/whatever, she cries. Softly, but audibly, and sounding a bit like that bird chirp heard at the beginning of the piece: maybe a canary in a coal mine – maybe the last surviving bird – warning of danger. Whatever it is, that lone bird’s chirp is the equivalent, and heard earlier, the foreshadowing, of The Guilty’s audible cry.
Thereafter, Yamada’s character gathers the herd back together, rallying her lambs for the next slaughter, in whatever form it may take.
And the Mickey Mouse Club reference? The song, and the visualization of happy acolytes, are metaphors for following the herd, on a level demonstrating how subversive a controlling figure, and the herd mentality, can be. The dance’s title itself may be a play on “Disneyland,” but I can’t be certain of that.
GALLIM in Andrea Miller’s “WONDERLAND”
Photo by Dan Chen
Somehow, with all this substance, I haven’t commented at all on the piece as a dance; the choreography. I don’t really need to. Suffice it to say that the characters move up, down, and around the stage, in various numbers and in a variety of movement qualities, that all fit within the dance’s overall message, but these dances, which are often “set pieces,” are wide-ranging and not limited to “leader-follower” imagery. The appended photos provide a taste of it. It’s never dull. And it’s always irreverent. And although I’ve tried to put a humorous face on this review, as Miller does in her dance, there’s nothing funny about it. On the contrary, it’s very sad.
Cue that bird chirp.
A masterpiece can take many forms. I’ve seen several within the past few weeks. WONDERLAND is another. Even without once alluding to orange hair.
If there are more pieces to Miller’s puzzle, I really don’t want to know. This was enough.
Well…there is one. Why use “Mr. Sandman”? I used to like that song when I was young. Very young. A mere toddler. Ok, an oversized toddler. And it was originally sung by a man, with the genders reversed (though I don’t recall whether, in that case, the idol would still have wavy hair like Liberace). It was just a request to the sleepmeister, Mr. Sandman, to bring her/him/them a dream(boat). What’s wrong with that? Like that request to Santa to bring that crazy-popular Cabbage Patch Doll. Or tickets to The Nutcracker, since all the other kids have already seen it.
Liberace??
Wait. Got it.
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