In the mad scene in Akram Khan’s Giselle for the English National Ballet at the Harris Theater, the corps de ballet encircles the title character just after she has discovered that the man she loves is betrothed to another. They clasp arms and huddle about her, pulsing like a heartbeat. They lift her, and she seems to float above a billowing skirt before she drops back down into an ocean that overwhelms, soaks, and submerges her. They swirl, hunchbacked and abstracted, hiding and revealing her, sometimes making the image of hive or a home, other times a herd or a school of fish. They swarm, leaping into the air, a stampede. This moment encapsulates the work of theater: individual feeling amplified and understood through a community.
The bright buzz of a forest of LEDs combined with dancers in Visceral Dance Chicago’s Synapse to show a vision of networked humans, part machine.
