By GUILHERME MELETTI YAZBEK
5, 4, 3, 2, 1—lift off! This is not the much-narrated Apollo 11, nor is it the latest Artemis II mission. In fact, the subject here is not the renewed space race currently underway in the twenty-first century. What took off last night at the New Hazlett Theater, as part of its Community Supported Art Performance Series (CSA), was Grappling, conceived, choreographed, and written by Erin Kouwe. The performance inhabits a hybrid territory—at the intersection of dance and theater, art and research, fiction and personal memory. The result is both rich in the reflections it provokes and compelling as an aesthetic experience. Moving between genuinely hilarious moments and precisely crafted, yet unforced, choreography—free from virtuosic excess—Grappling lands as a mature, thoughtfully constructed contemporary work.
We begin in blackout, in the striking performance space of the New Hazlett, accompanied only by sound. Gradually, what emerges—rolling and unfolding across different levels—are three sidereal figures: terrestrial astronauts. The stage is largely stripped of its usual black drapery, and glowing spherical elements made of Chinese paper lanterns evoke celestial bodies. The scenic design (Natalie Rose Mabry), along with the costumes, situates us within this intergalactic fiction, which serves as both a narrative and philosophical foundation for the piece. Following this spatial prologue, the figure of the researcher—performed by Kouwe herself—enters, accompanied by her assistant (Ken Sprowls).
Equipped with what once counted as cutting-edge technology—at least when I, and likely Kouwe, were children in school: an overhead projector—and armed with a series of philosophical questions, the artist-researcher leads us on a journey that is at once deeply personal and broadly universal. The fictional premise establishes the comedic tone that runs throughout the work: a (fake) scientific experiment in which Kouwe has inserted all her memories into the minds of three individuals and sent them into space—where gravity no longer interferes—in order to test various capacities, including creativity and efficiency. This dramaturgical structure is rendered on stage with clarity and economy. Downstage right sits the researcher’s station, complete with the projector, a screen, and a series of transparencies onto which narrative elements are gradually layered as the experiment unfolds. The remainder of the stage functions as a metaphorical space—a crossroads between outer space, a movement laboratory, and the artist’s familial memory. This space gains verticality through the use of a single, mobile scenic object—a double-sided ladder on wheels, constantly activated by the performers—as well as through the exposure of the theater’s technical walkways, made visible by the deliberate removal of the usual black box enclosure.
The direction by the multidimensional artist Treasure Treasure is precise and assured. The multiple languages at play coexist without excess or mannerism, and the theatrical logic of the fictional device integrates seamlessly with moments of dance stricto sensu. What unfolds in Grappling is successive iterations of Kouwe’s pseudo-scientific inquiry: “Germinated Recall in Assessment of Personal Productivity and/or Lassitude In Null Gravity.” Within an autofictional framework, the artist revisits family memory through an archive composed of letters, photographs, episodes, and music. Transposed into this staged experiment, these materials become prompts through which the three astronauts—performed by Lindsay Fisher Viatori, Kaylin Horgan, and Sarah Zielinski—are invited to test different parameters. These movement sequences are consistently engaging—both pleasurable to watch and, at times, unexpectedly funny. On more than one occasion, the dancers develop movement from a gestural vocabulary derived from a childhood photograph of Kouwe, which, once projected and interpreted through her scientific-affective reading, provokes generous laughter from the audience. The researcher and her assistant are not excluded from the domain of movement. Their collaborative—and at times clumsy—dynamic evokes familiar comic pairings, somewhere between Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson, and Don Quixote and Sancho Panza, transforming disagreement and hierarchy into sequences that are both comic and quietly lyrical.
This entire fictional and scenic apparatus operates as a projection of Kouwe’s philosophical concerns, which land with clarity and restraint. She is the only performer on stage who speaks—the sole bearer of rhetoric, organizing logos, ethos, and pathos. The other figures remain silent, communicating instead through a more pantomimic register. Through this asymmetry, the centrality of the artistic gesture becomes evident. Kouwe interweaves memory with philosophical speculation, dance with scientific frameworks, and theater with lecture, in an attempt to grapple with what might be considered one of the central dilemmas of artistic practice under capitalism: productivity and the use of time. She does so without resorting to simplistic answers, but also without collapsing into paralyzing aporia. In the post-show discussion, the artist described Grappling as an experiment aimed at reconciling the two hemispheres of her brain—the rational and the emotional, the academic and the artistic—divisions that are also historically and culturally constructed, I would add. From a theoretical standpoint, her work engages with key ideas from queer theory, though never in an overtly didactic way. Drawing, for instance, on the queer phenomenology of Sara Ahmed and the queer temporality of José Esteban Muñoz—his “then and there,” the “not yet” of a cruising utopia—the piece reflects on artistic practice as something that resists alignment with capitalist logics of productivity.
This refusal of normative structures operates both thematically and formally. It appears not only in the experiment’s conceptual framework but also in fragments of text that surface throughout the performance via the many transparencies projected on stage. What becomes increasingly evident is a recurring sense of failure or insufficiency attributed to the three astronauts. The researcher, in evaluating their responses to her prompts, appears consistently dissatisfied with their levels of efficiency and creativity. My reading of this symbolic gesture is manifold. On one level, it can be understood as a rejection—or, as Kouwe states, a deviation—from capitalist imperatives of productivity, affirming instead the non-teleological pleasure of both creating and experiencing dance. On another, it suggests a refusal of creativity itself, insofar as creativity has become subsumed within contemporary capitalist demands for constant novelty and innovation. If creativity today implies producing ever more—more new, more striking, more “genius”—then perhaps the more radical gesture is to refuse to be creative altogether. This is at once a poetic and political stance, one that resonates with the postmodern dance refusal articulated in Yvonne Rainer’s No Manifesto (1965).
With lightness, humor, and a movement vocabulary that remains consistently engaging, Grappling emerges as a performative articulation of what Jack Halberstam has termed the “queer art of failure”—a concept explicitly referenced within the work itself. It rejects not only capitalist and bourgeois assumptions, but also heteronormative frameworks, both in relation to dance as a language and to the notion of family as inherently tied to the nuclear model. Grappling is a queer artistic gesture that eschews virtuosic affectation, inviting us to reconsider our own horizon of expectations when encountering dance in a theatrical context. It does so with maturity, supported by a team of performers and collaborators sustained by the CSA program at the New Hazlett Theater, which here reaffirms its role as a space for artistic exchange and creative freedom.
“Where does the Earth meet the sky?” the artist asks toward the end of the performance. The question lingers, unresolved. Without attempting to close it, I would venture a response: in the movement of the body. It is through dance that the ethereal and the terrestrial converge—never statically, always in motion.
TICKETS AND DETAILS
Grappling performances are April 16th and 17th, 2026 at the New Hazlett Theater. Tickets available at https://ci.ovationtix.com/36406
Guilherme is a Brazilian theater practitioner and scholar, currently pursuing a PhD in Theatre and Performance Studies at the University of Pittsburgh. www.guilhermeyazbek.com
Categories: Reviews
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