Review: Chalk Outline Portal, a Dance Show You Control

The music is already pumping when you enter the big room at Theaterlab, where Tony Bordonaro and Ingrid Kapteyn are presenting their interactive dance show Chalk Outline Portal under the banner of their company, Welcome to Campfire. Dressed in white jumpsuits to match the all-white room and blindfolded with white bandanas (a symbol that indicates a love of masturbation in the old gay hanky code), they are dance scientists, prepared to take big risks to push the form forward. Like all worthwhile experiments, Chalk Outline Portal produces some revelations and a whole lot more questions.

Following the preshow, during which the blindfolded Tony feels his way around the audience for some ice-breaking banter, the two stars lead the audience in the Macarena, an activity that Tony describes as “mandatory fun,” eerily recalling cringe-inducing HR events I have attended in my capacity as a corporate citizen. What could this portend?

Tony and Ingrid are uninterested in spoon-feeding themes to their audience. That’s clear from a trippy early monologue about a howling lobster that is also, somehow, the speaker. It’s the kind of thing you might hear over brunch from someone who indulged in hallucinogens the night before.

Stripping off their jumpsuits to reveal black leotards festooned with glow-in-the-dark caution tape (the costumes are by Victoria Bek), Tony and Ingrid perform the kind of sweaty, full-contact dance that is both physically impressive and mostly opaque. They are fully locked-in as they devour each other’s negative space. Video designer Roberto Araujo gets in close to shoot live video that is projected on the white walls (projections by Camilla Tassi), offering cinematic close-ups that still don’t fully explain what is transpiring—but we can see it means a lot to the performers.

Both veterans of Sleep No More, Tony and Ingrid have devised two interactive segments in which six “premium players” hold vintage Nintendo controls, which trigger sound cues instructing the blindfolded dancers how to move (the cortisol-spiking sound design is by Marc Cardarelli, who also acts as a live DJ).

Completely unaware of the objective of the game, I was pretty useless as a player in the first segment—though I did discern that we were meant to bring Tony and Ingrid together (or “home”) by the second go around. But by then, all six players were controlling the game at once, leading to a cacophony of conflicting directives that kept Tony and Ingrid hopping up and down and very much apart. It’s a blunt yet effective metaphor for life under late capitalism.

Lia Menaker has designed a sound collage of anguished voicemails suggesting an intense attraction between the two dancers that may nevertheless be doomed by circumstance. It raises a difficult discussion in a time when the illusion of personal control over our lives seems to be eroding with each new technological wind. In such uncertainty, one desperately wants someone or something certain to hold on to.