THE GARDEN OF EDEN, SEXY AND IN BROOKLYN

In Austin McCormick’s glittering production of "Le Serpent Rouge: A Titillating Tragedy", the Garden of Eden looks like a stripped down circus ring, presided over by a whip-cracking mistress of ceremonies. In a Brooklyn warehouse space, the redoubtable Gioia Marchese, our ring mistress, ushers us into “a sort of paradise, if you will”, and then proceeds to dissect our notions of Original Sin. Adam and Eve swing languidly and a little dopily from twin trapezes until Lilith and the Serpent galvanise them into knowledge. As he did in his sumptuous "The Judgment of Paris", McCormick and Company XIV, his troupe, plunder a variety sources in this mix of theatre and dance—the Book of Genesis, Jean Cocteau, Charles Bukowski, John Erskine and Thomas Mann—to investigate myth and our cultural responses to it.

The snake in the garden appears as a gorgeous drag queen: Davon Rainey, in corset and Marie Antoinette wig, prances and shimmies to the fruity orchestrations of Paul Anka’s “Adam and Eve”. Like the bikinied girls at wrestling matches, Rainey coyly wields ad cards to introduce each of the Seven Deadly Sins. McCormick's unhappy ménage-a-trois of Adam, Eve and Lilith paces along the carousel rail, acquiring and divesting clothes (seemingly in a nod to Pina Bausch) as they discover their capacity for longing and loss. Scenes drawing on the history of dance, and range from Baroque gluttony to a pistols-at-dawn duel.

The choreography captures the woe within marriage, with tormented couplings invariably ending in separation and loneliness. Laura Careless takes Eve from sleepy naiveté through a romp of sensual possibility and then domestic heartbreak. Opposite John Beasant III's Adam, she becomes a film noir dame, vengeful yet bewildered. Beasant brings a poignant blankness to his Adam, allowing the women around him to define his path in a terrifying new world. Yeva Glover’s Lilith is beautiful and pitiless, alluring yet cruel. She lip-synchs Marilyn Monroe’s breathy and unhappily self-parodic birthday tribute to President Kennedy, and leads Adam astray in lingerie and stilettos. Marchese, our guide and fellow observer, puts down her whip halfway through and wearily watches these mortals as she smokes a cigarette alongside the stage.

Extravagance yields to subtlety throughout: a single chaise facing upstage suggests a comfortable suburban marriage wrecked by infidelity; a mirror serves as gateway from paradise to a hard and unwelcoming postlapsarian world. The achievement of Company XIV in "Le Serpent Rouge" is to enlist music and dance in a process of rediscovery and realisation. Austin McCormick and his dancers, steeped in the discipline and traditions of art yet aware of its outrageous possibilities, transform a timeless tale into something new.

~ ENID STUBIN

"Le Serpent Rouge: A Titillating Tragedy". At 303 Bond Street, Brooklyn, NY, through June 6th

Picture credit: Steven Schreiber