United States Various, ‘Check-Mate’: Dancers of BODYTRAFFIC. The Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts, Beverly Hills, 11.12.2025. (JRo)
The spirited, LA-based BODYTRAFFIC once again delivered an absorbing and entertaining evening of dance. Humor and irony, so absent in many contemporary dance programs, is always welcome at BODYTRAFFIC, and Cayetano Soto’s Schachmatt is a case in point.
Schachmatt (‘Checkmate!’) is nothing like Ninette de Valois’s Checkmate, created for the Vic-Wells Ballet in 1937 with music by Arthur Bliss, which featured characters on a chessboard acting out a human drama of kings, queens and knights. Soto places his characters in a black and white Felliniesque universe. Ten dancers, dressed in a monochrome palette of pale grey shirts, ties and shorts, clustered on a black and white chessboard that covered the stage floor. With black jockey helmets and knee socks, they looked ready for a day at the races. To a score that ranged from a French chanson by Rina Ketty to music by Mancini and the Mexican Los Panchos trio, they delivered a knock-out performance of idiosyncratic movements: bobbing their heads like woodpeckers, fluttering fingertips like itchy safecrackers, bouncing imaginary basketballs, jerking their torsos like go-go dancers. They tipped their jockey caps à la Bob Fosse’s Cabaret bowler hats and, with backs swayed, moved with the precision of Radio City Rockettes. The music shifted seamlessly from song to song. Whether pirouetting or mock ballroom dancing, the gifted corps exhibited clear lines and pitch-perfect timing, allowing the originality of the choreography to shine. The highest compliment I can pay is that I was itching to jump on the stage and join the chess game.
Coalescence, by first-time choreographer and a member of BODYTRAFFIC, Jordyn Santiago, eschewed humor for drama. In a statement about the piece, she states, ‘Coalescence explores the deeply personal and yet universal journey from self-doubt and isolation to joy and self-love…this work is a vibrant, affirming love letter to femininity, queerness and community’. Dressed in diaphanous grey gowns, an all-female cast of six dancers (with Santiago as principal) reveled in the angst-driven choreography to music by Rafa Aslan. Like Trojan women, they massed together in attitudes of suffering. At its most mundane, the dance was overly self-referential; but when Santiago practiced restraint, her work evoked ancient mythology. At times the women seemed like tribal elders as, with knees bent and flat feet in second position, they rocked side to side. There was a moment that reminded me of Nijinsky’s Afternoon of a Faun: the dancers, side by side in profile, moved as one entity, elbows bent and arm touching arm. They were Greek goddesses or nymphs on an ancient vase. Coaxing the doubting Santiago into their fold, the tribe of women rejoiced in their unity and, in a final sequence, danced to high-spirited house music.
David Middenthorp’s Flyland, with poignant music by Genevieve Murphy and Cinematic Orchestra, exists in the space where dance meets video art. Katie Garcia and Joan Rodriguez enact a domestic scene. Projected onto a massive screen at the back of the stage, the couple sits opposite one another at a rectangular red table in a white room. There are bookshelves and a ladder, a fireplace and a window with curtains on the wall. The catch is that the couple are actually lying on the stage floor, their bodies and furnishings projected. The floor has the same scene barely visible, allowing Garcia and Rodriquez to move in ways that seem to place them in the screen on the wall. It is a charming effect as Rodriguez climbs the ladder or wine spills in slow motion when he slams the table. The scene changes to a cloudscape and the couple are off into the stratosphere, sometimes flying on the screen (while moving on the floor), sometimes dancing upright on the stage with only a skyscape behind them. The projections change until, finally, they are carried away by a giant crow. There are animated effects: giant arms and hands in silhouette that guide them here and there. The piece was a mere ten minutes, but the couple’s relationship was touching – it seemed a struggle was underway: to stay together or to part? The dancers were elegant in their precision and lent their very human souls to the task.
In Secret Goodbye, a world premiere by choreographer Trey McIntyre to music by Sam Cooke, three men and one woman happily huddle together. In their white shirts and shorts, they were like a powwow of Marx Brothers ready to burst into movement. Glimmers of popular dance intermingled with ballet’s leaps and lunges. They were a companionable quartet, seeming to take pleasure in their little community. Their joie de vivre reminded me of Paul Taylor’s Company B to music by The Andrews Sisters. Like Company B, which is frolicsome until it confronts the toll of World War II, Secret Goodbye has an antic energy, until the mood changes. Each dancer performed a solo, which was punctuated by the sound of a heartbeat – a dark reminder of the sadness lurking in examined lives, or perhaps it was an evocation of Mikhail Baryshnikov famously dancing to the sound of his own heartbeat. Either way, McIntyre and the excellent dancers of BODYTRAFFIC proved that this is a company worth seeing again and again.
Jane Rosenberg
Schachmatt (‘Checkmate!’)
Choreography, Sets, Costumes, Lighting – Cayetano Soto
Music – Rina Ketty, Michel Legrand, Henry Mancini and Jack Costanzo, Monna Bell, María Teresa Lara, Toña La Negra and Los Panchos
Dancers – Jahnell D. Boozer, Grecia Cruz, Chandler Davidson, Becky García, Katie García, Pedro Garcia, Brenan Gonzalez, Joan Rodriguez, Jordyn Santiago, Kennedy Simon
Coalescence
Choreography – Jordyn Santiago
Music – Rafa Aslan
Lighting – Michael Jarett
Costumes – UNNAMED design
Dancers – Grecia Cruz, Katie García, Becky García, Jordyn Santiago, Jahnell D. Boozer, Kennedy Simon
Flyland
Choreography, Lighting, Animations, Visual design – David Middenthorp
Music – Genevieve Murphy and Cinematic Orchestra
Costumes – Ben Voorhaar
Dancers – Katie Garcia, Joan Rodriguez
Secret Goodbye
Choreography – Trey McIntyre
Music – Sam Cooke
Lighting – Michael Jarett
Costumes – Susan Roemer
Dancers – Chandler Davidson, Pedro Garcia, Brenan Gonzalez, Jordyn Santiago