Cynthia Koppe, front, and Tim Bendernagel in “Visitation.”Credit…Ian Douglas

Accent on Community:
Visitation by John Jasperse

Siobhan Burke
Dec 2, 2022

The effects of the pandemic’s darkest days continue to linger, though not always in obvious ways. After so much isolation, it’s probably no coincidence that some of this year’s most moving and memorable performances stood out for the spirit of community they conjured: a sense of genuine friendship among the dancers onstage, radiating out to draw the audience in. That spirit also encompassed dancers of the past, presences felt but not seen.

An eerier kind of togetherness emerged in John Jasperse’s “Visitation,” for Doug LeCours, Tim Bendernagel and Cynthia Koppe. Invoking ghosts and ghostliness, this spacious yet intricate work managed to fill NYU Skirball’s expansive stage, building to a climax in which the three dancers, uncannily, appeared enmeshed as one. At the same time, throughout the piece, it was hard to look away from Koppe, who gave a quietly magnificent performance: so rigorously present in her body, she seemed to have broken through to a different realm.

Read the entire article HERE

NY Times Review of Visitation

Robert Siebert
Sept,2, 2022

Between the youthful attractiveness of these articulate dancers (whom Jasperse credits as performing collaborators) and the meticulous compositional finesse of the choreography — replete with symmetries and crossing lines, controlled even when it pushes toward looping leaps and turns — “Visitation” feels as concerned with beauty as it is with death. Perhaps with the death of beauty, or, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, with death as the mother of beauty.

At the center is no less than the prelude to “Tristan und Isolde,” that lushest mixing of sex and death. It accompanies a ghostly duet for LeCours and Bendernagel. At first they barely touch: the back of a hand down a leg, an arm through the gap made by the other’s arm. This builds into a loose, conjoined tumbling that’s strangely disembodied — like a version of contact improvisation in which the goal is not to share weight but to diffuse it. As Wagner swells, they roll on the ground, nearly like lovers in the waves, from here to eternity.

Read entire review HERE