To find out just who’s upcoming down town, try the Gotham Dance Festival. Through June 12, four downtown companies are presenting shows in rotation — with three other emerging choreographers highlighted during weekend matinees.
The festival kicked off Wednesday with Brian Brooks Moving Company. Brooks is not only a choreographer but a runner, and you can tell — his dances are endurance tests for the performers. You feel as if you could burn calories just by watching them.
“Motor,” made last year, sports a cool set — an arch of cables strung above the audience toward the stage, as if you’re seeing the dance as tunnel traffic in the distance.
Four men and three women in simple blue shirts and pants chug forward and back to the pulsing recorded score. It’s as much athletics as dance as they lean against one another or braid themselves in trios, like in a game of Twister.
The simple movement is insistent, and doesn’t let up. As “Motor” drives on, the dancers strip down to their underwear — and a layer of sweat. A final duet for Brooks and Aaron Walter looks almost like pairs skating as the two men course about the stage, flipping directions.
Brooks also performs a solo, “I’m Going To Explode” — which, as the title suggests, is a short freakout — only in a suit. The closer, “Descent,” is a premiere, for which lighting designer Philip Trevino created a velvety landscape with beams of light slicing the darkness horizontally.
As visually arresting and physically impressive as the pieces are, they all begin and end seemingly out of nowhere. “Descent” finished so abruptly that the audience didn’t know whether it was time to applaud.
Brooks seems so focused on the endorphin high that it doesn’t matter to him if his dances actually go anywhere. There’s too much marathon and too little journey.
The company performs his workout again tomorrow. Watch, too, for Monica Bill Barnes and her sweet, loopy humor tonight, and, at this weekend’s matinees, Kyle Abraham’s savvy hip-hop and Faye Driscoll’s uncomfortably funny, brazen theatricality.