Nine naked people pose on a grassy lawn, like statues in a sculpture garden: standing, sitting, squatting, reclining in stillness. The light is warm, and bright but melancholy music plays. This is the scene that greets you as you enter “Aging Prelude,” a brief and delicately composed new work by the choreographic duo Chameckilerner (Rosane Chamecki and Andrea Lerner), which had its premiere at the Chocolate Factory Theater on Friday.
In the postures of the performers, who range in age from their 20s to their 70s, you might recognize works of art like Degas’s “Spanish Dancer” (Jailyn Phillips-Wiley, an arm curved over her head, the other in front of her torso); or Rodin’s “The Thinker” (Ted Johnson, who sits hunched on a tree stump in the grass, chin on hand). The physical lexicon of “Aging Prelude” comes from images of nudes in painting, sculpture and photography throughout history. The choreographers are explicit about their source material, displaying these images on a wall in the theater lobby.
While these artworks capture bodies at a single moment in time, often fetishizing or idealizing their subjects, “Aging Prelude” is more interested in how time alters and marks a body, as well as the body’s sense of itself. A meditation on change, this 45-minute work is also a fresh start of sorts. In 2007, after more than a decade of making highly physical and psychological dance works, Chemeckilerner, a Brazilian duo based in New York, presented what they framed as their last. “Exit” explored, in their words, “the concept of extinguishing themselves as an artistic entity”: a “funeral rite” for their career. “Aging Prelude” is a quiet resurrection.
The performers remain still for a long while, as Paul Parreira’s music, with its looping strums and reverberations, washes over the space. The audience sits on the cast’s level, surrounding the grassy area (Taylor Friel’s set design). Bria Bacon is the first to drop out of her opening pose, stride to another location and assume a new art-historical position. The music fades, leaving only a faint ticking that will eventually fade, too. Bobbi Salvör Menuez, slouching and holding up a loose fist, speaks into the near-silence: “I am holding a frog.”