*

Origami Night, a choreo poem based on the poetry of Pamela Annas. Performed by Elenaluisa Alvarez; narrated by Luz Nicolàs; choreographed by Graham Cole; libretto, set design and lighting by Christopher Annas-Lee; costumes designed by Virginia Belt. At the Boston Center for the Arts Plaza Black Box Theatre, 539 Tremont Street, Boston, Massachusetts.

 Review by Off the Shelf correspondent Tom Daley

Recently I went to see Origami Night at the Black Box Theater at Boston Center for the Arts. I want to most enthusiastically encourage anyone who is able to brave the heat wave we are enduring in the Boston area to get out and take in this riveting, brain-shimmering, thoroughly engaging fifty minutes of theater, which has three performances remaining (the theater is air-conditioned, in case that wasn’t clear!).

Origami Night is a choreo poem composed of excerpts of the poetry of Pamela Annas, a feminist Sylvia Plath scholar and a now-retired professor at U Mass-Boston. Her son, Christopher Annas-Lee and his creative partner, the Portland (Oregon)-based choreographer Graham Cole, conceived of the fifty-minute show which will delight connoisseurs of ballet, modern dance, and performance poetry.

The sole live performer of the show (the narration of the poetry was recorded) is the dancer, Elenaluisa Alvarez, a furiously talented movement artist whose aggressively graceful and spiritedly athletic classical ballet and modern dance moves would be enough to enthrall even the most exacting dance critic. But she adds to that expertise the execution of now comical, now melancholic, now exuberantly idiosyncratic gestures – pouts, punts. grimaces, grunting torso twists, wry smiles, spooky shoulder tremors, neck contortions, and withering collapses – all done in precise synchronicity with certain phrases of Annas’ poetry – gestures that demonstrate that she is a marvelous actress as well.

Most of these moves were adeptly choreographed by Graham Cole, but one can sense the way in which Alvarez incorporated the precise instruction and wrestled and wrapped her own vigor and elan, her own graciousness, and her own passion and pain into the choreographer’s imagination.

Annas’ poetry, full of that kind of nostalgia that purges longing of any sentimentality with its clear-eyed and candid reconnoitering of its subjects – an army brat past, a swing dance-hall denizen’s exhilaration, a mother’s woes and wonders – was narrated, in the sparking soundtrack/libretto dreamed up by Christopher Annas-Lee, by Luz Nicolàs, an actress who has spent most of her career in Spanish-speaking theater (this was her first performance in English).

The odd choice of narrator with a Latin-inflected voice for the poetry of a bottle-blonde, sunhat-sporting gringa professor somehow worked just about perfectly, although there were times when it was a little hard to follow all the words. Nicolàs’s elucidation of the poems has the flavor of a sometimes spunky, sometimes affectionately wary abuela (grandmother) ruminating with matter-of-fact sobriety over the bittersweets and the redolent triumphs of a life lived with attitude and attention, with wry perspicuity, and with an insistence that simultaneously flickers and flares through the rigor of her sturdy voice. Hers is an inventive channeling of the spirit of Annas’ storytelling, but with an affecting fidelity to the distinction between the narrator’s background and that of the poet.

The difference between the voice of the narrator and the culture of the poet adds a fascinating disruption to the expectations we have for the libretto – the Latin voice complicates and complements the Anglo experience with its implied and ironic resistance in its fond, at times distanced interpretation of the articulations of a poet who is part if not parcel of the dominating culture.

The platform on which Elenaluisa Alvarez strutted and whirled and broke and then rearmed herself in a bundle of gyrating gesticulations was designed and built by Christopher Annas-Lee, who also wrote the libretto. Annas-Lee, an up-and-coming theater lighting designer whose talents I first appreciated years ago when he was involved with the young and precocious Circuit Theater company, a Newton (Massachusetts)-based troupe with Broadway production values, fashioned a circular stage replete with an elaborate (and sometimes dizzying) network of LED lights and special effects. These included three overpowering blasts of a thunderstorm that made us forget that we were under the impression that we were seated in a ring around the dance floor of a discotheque.

In the final movement of the choreo poem, realizing the choreographer Graham Cole’s cleverness, Alvarez opens a hatch at the center of Annas-Lee’s stage and yanks out a many-yards-long tube charged with white neon light whose severity rivals the marquees of Las Vegas. The actress-dancer pulls the tube offstage where she, a modern-day Eve, seems to be at once caressing and recoiling from the phallic serpentine grip of the glowing hose. The post-Eden, modest Alvarez-Eve is covered in a blouse that was designed by Virginia Belt, one that those of us who know Pamela Annas would recognize as having an apt resonance with Annas’s personal style.

While just about everything was done to perfection in this production, I wish that the talents of Elenaluisa Alvarez as an actress had been more emphasized than her extraordinary skills as a practitioner of ballet moves and modern dance gymnastics. The first part of the show was rather top-heavy with a kind of show-offy exhibition of many of the moves in her impressive arsenal of arm stretches and balances and toes pointed at the ceiling – an exhibition in which it was hard to feel a connection with the poetry, except at the level of a kind of a too-generalized, overarching, yet resonant joy.

With a performance centered around an Annas poem that references the Brecht-Weill song, Mack the Knife (the speakers in the theater blasted out a growling Louis Armstrong’s rendition), the exhibitionism began to slow to a series of facial contortions, wrinkling bows, shimmering and blubbering knee bends, a series in which every raised eyebrow, every hip surge, every sophisticatedly hesitant pirouette seemed to be driven by the pistons of the poetry (and the music), to honor its specificity, its emotional complexity, a deeply satisfying and authentic product of the collaboration between movement artist, choreographer, narrator, stage-and-lighting designer-librettist, and poet that informed most of the rest of this remarkable show.