“The first of these pieces, “To by Two” (choreographed by Margaret Wiss and danced by Nora Buonagurio, Katy Esper), lived and breathed through an intriguing, unique frame. The only score was two dancers’ breath and speech. At downstage left, they were lit diagonally from upstage right. Simple and black costumes matched this dark, pared-down aesthetic. “Inhale, exhale” they began, with movement into and out of each other’s negative space. Their speech moved into directional words, combined with “inhale” and “exhale” – “uphale”, “acrosshale”. In commanding tone, it felt like the directions of a choreographer – a dance rehearsal! This felt quite “meta” (art commenting on itself), and (arguably) not fully relatable to non-dancers, until one dancer began to run.

The work then seemed to morph meaning into the cyclical nature of life – directions to and fro, yet patterns such as our very breath consistent whichever way we may move. One would have to ask the artists to know if this was their intended meaning, but it is a poignant one to be found. Movement throughout was just as striking – multi-speed, multi-quality, multi-dimentional, and evidently true to the best natural inclinations of the two dancers’ bodies. The ending brought longer speech from one dancer – a unique definition of “exhale” that seemed to further that idea of the life force of cyclical breath underlying all that we do. All this meaning came from simple speech and two moving bodies!”