Review: Creativity and self-actualization come alive in ‘Perverse Fantasy’

Even before the dancing began Friday, Mathew Janczewski’s “Only the Perverse Fantasy Can Still Save Us” exhibited a rich visual and aural landscape.

A giant pile of green fabric — part of Lelis Brito’s ambitious set design — sat in a pile on center stage at the Walker Art Center, with cables attached at numerous points. Behind it, a cloudlike backdrop with two mirror images on each side — like a Rorschach test — hung at the back of the stage.

As Joshua Clausen’s unnerving electro-acoustic music score began to pulse, footage of an ice climber on a snowy mountain appeared — also as a mirror image — on screen. The footage was thematically distinct from the choreography that came after it, but introduced the feeling of danger, and perhaps adventure.

Slowly, the cables attached to the cloth began to pull the fabric away from the center of the stage, revealing three fetal bodies brought to life as if they were awakening for the first time.

The “perverse fantasy” of the title didn’t manifest as sexual deviance, though the work was subtly erotic. The three beings appeared as genderless globules that couldn’t stop touching one another for the first half of the dance. Later, when they began to separate and break off into solos and duets, their movements emphasized body parts distinctive of their gender.

Janczewski, founder of Arena Dances, found inspiration for this choreography from Matthew Barney’s “Cremaster” cycle (1994–2002), as well as Guggenheim Museum curator Nancy Spector’s monograph about the epic work, from which the choreographer took his title.

Barney’s films loosely explore the stages of gender differentiation and development that begin after six weeks. Ultimately they are about creativity and self-actualization, and those themes carried through in Janczewski’s work.

Wearing costumes by Jon “Maggie” Mags made with lavender netting and pink ribbons and hoods that covered their faces, dancers Dustin Haug, Sarah McCullough and Leslie O’Neill showed a tremendous amount of trust in one another as movers.

In earlier sections, they danced as one being — sharing weight, holding each other up, and being in tune with one another at every moment. In choreographed sections later in the piece, that connection remained, even as space and tension emerged between the performers.

The gauzy fabric of Brito’s set design acted as a fourth dancer at times, manipulated like a puppet by unseen stage hands. Karin Olson’s lighting design, too, added a dramatic element to the evolution of this primordial birth story, while Clausen’s relentless score kept the heart pounding.

Brito’s final set piece — a giant cage that was lowered slowly at first before free-falling into an abrupt blackout, left a bit of a cliff-hanger. Its enormity and ominous meaning suggested an unseen last act the audience didn’t get to see. Will the newly realized beings soon find themselves trapped inside that giant box? The production didn’t answer that question, and left us with the sense of looming danger.