Ultima Vez's Infamous Offspring—Physical Theater and High Camp

Tijen Lawton, flying above the cast of Infamous Offspring. Photo: Flavia Tartaglia

It’s good to know that the gods quarrel and nitpick among each other, the same—or more dramatically, anyway—as mortal families do. Dad gets called out by mom for philandering. The kids argue about which of them is their parents’ favorite. One dreams about being born without her contorted feet, and walking and running normally. Yet another’s body is inhabited by her father so he can fornicate with another sibling.

In Infamous Offspring, choreographer Wim Vandekeybus and company sort these speculative nuggets into a multimedia, many-scened opus that plays out on screens, on butcher paper as art created live, and through exhiilarating movement, all backed by a varied sound track of rock music and samples (Warren Ellis/Dirty Three, ILA). It bears a certain wild, unhinged punk sensibility shared in sui generis works by Belgian troupe Needcompany, where key Ultima Vez performer Tijen Lawton performed for years, with their live rock-scored crazy quilts of drama and movement.

Lawton scuttles onstage, ambling like a crab, scooting forward on bent knees with her hands. She reaches a waiting length of butcher paper hanging from a roll, and begins to draw one of several pictures done throughout the piece. A cheesy silver droid appears onscreen, tapping and skittering his fingers across the tabletop. The company of 11 filters onstage, at times hurtling high and barrel leaping, each doing their own crazy thing. One man is told to kill everyone else, and so he does, fake choking and stabbing his siblings. Their parents appear on a higher screen, a pair actors treading the wire between Shakespearean and high camp in a minimalist dwelling.

Photo: Dries Vanderaerden

Dancers scale the lower screen on perpendicular pegs we can’t see, a kind of modern Mount Olympus, from where they observe their spatting brethren. The lower panel later splits into five, creating an effective array of portals and smaller screens. As we were warned in advance, there are many acted depictions of rape and violence, often performed in a hyper, exaggerated anime style, but there’s no questioning the dedication by the performers. Lawton in particular stretches herself, literally, walking as if on malformed feet, drawing several works of art, and getting thrown aloft by the other dancers four times. All the dancers were heroic, Adrian Thömmes and Lotta Sandborgh particularly fearless and savage.

It’s a kind of full-out, propriety-be-damned melange of dance/theater that once was a hallmark of BAM’s Next Wave, and other venues. (In fact, Ultimate Vez performed there in the late 20th century.) There is little likelihood that a work such as this would be produced by Americans, particularly in this fake-pious era of Christmas pageants and country music. It evokes a period in performance when art was the most outrageous thing happening, not reality.

While there is an urgent, portentous overtone to the work, it winks at us repeatedly—the video of the silver man clattering away at his desk, or hammering with shoe heels, the chastity belt-like contraptions donned by everyone that look more like childrens’ Halloween costumes, the arrogant parents who seem right out of a Bergman film. The taste level might be questioned, but the dancers’ skill and absolute physical commitment is definitely not.

ABT Fine-tunes Its Programming

Chloe Misseldine and Joo Won Ahn in Have We Met?! Photo: Steven Pisano.

Assembling a New York ABT season is no simple matter, whether it’s for the longer, summer Met Opera run featuring mainly full-length ballets, or the shorter fall run at the Koch Theater. Scars are still healing from the post-pandemic period, with funding less certain than ever, when more traditional taste plays tug-of-war with innovation, and when name choreographers are commissioned by multiple large companies, creating a weird parallel repertory. ABT’s 2025 Koch season reflects these pressures in some ways, as seen in three programs which I caught.

Skylar Brandt, Hee Seo, and Léa Fleytoux in Gala Performance. Photo: Steven Pisano.

ABT @ 85: A Retrospective of Master Choreographers offered three varying ballets which felt jarring in juxtaposition, but which make sense in a historical context. Les Sylphides, a Romantic confection by Michel Fokine which premiered at a 1908 fundraiser, led off with a demonstration of that genre’s tasteful, boneless interpretation of otherworldly spirits manifested in flesh and blood. Its careful, often mincing movement, the effortful softening of landings (a perversity demanded of women on pointe shoes), and no jutting joints or ugly flexed extremities. The driving impetus is Chopin’s intoxicatingly lush music, which often flows like water, with tempi varying between nocturnes. Hee Seo is one of the company’s most fluid and ethereal dancers, and here partnered with Cory Stearns, leads Léa Fleytoux, Fangqi Li, and a large corps through tableaux of beauty and elegance. Without a narrative, abstracted of any tragedy such as Giselle or Swan Lake, it is however, boring.

The head-spinning corrective emerged in the next work, Antony Tudor’s Gala Performance (1977), to Prokofiev. Seo again dances, this time as an Italian prima ballerina who enters and insistently exits—but only solo—in slow motion, taking ponderous strides, right-angled arms held waist high, as if sitting in a recliner. Here we see Seo’s wry wit as a dancer, delivering with all seriousness hilariously awkward duets with Michael de la Nuez, her oversized ostrich feather headdress sweeping over their limbs like a feather duster. Skylar Brandt danced the Russian Ballerina, fiery, independent, and utterly slapstick. Fleytoux was the French ballerina, proving that she’s becoming indispensable in repertory casting. Perhaps the trick of this Tudor folly is its dedication and relatively long duration, but the jokes wear thin about halfway through.

Patrick Frenette, Breanne Granlund, and Carlos Gonzalez in Rodeo. Photo: Nir Arieli.

Onto Rodeo (1942), by Agnes De Mille, to Copland’s essential music. While decades older than the Tudor, it’s a blast of fresh air in almost every way, bar the lapsing of the feminist plot line, as the Cowgirl—Leanne Granlund—dons a dress and finally gains the attention of the roving cowboys’ leers. Copland’s fundamentally American score provides a solid base for De Mille’s vocabulary, radical in its simplicity and concise narrative meaning. The cowboys salute, flicking their hat brims, stomp and jump with horse-astride stances, and chassee raucously across the stage, arms swinging invisible lassos. The womenfolk, in long frilly dresses, cluster and titter, haughtily sticking their noses in the air and walking primly. Granlund (liberated for at least the first part of Rodeo from the soubrette) carouses with the guys, becoming a confidant rather than an object of pursuit. As much as any ballet role, Cowgirl can change a dancer’s perceived image from demi-solo, petite ballerina to well-rounded theatrical dancer.

Twyla @ 60: A Tharp Celebration comprised three of her most balletic dances, making good use of the company’s technical skill. Sextet (1992) demands pizazz and flair, chock full of fast spins and nailed poses. The music provides different tempos and moods, at times giving a Slavic feel. Bach Partita (1983) premiered on Tharp’s company, but its ranks likely expanded in its ABT iteration. It is structured by the mathematical satisfaction of Bach’s composition (played heroically on violin by Kobi Malkin), complimented by Tharp’s virtuosic and logical balletic phrases. Add to that Santo Loquasto’s flattering short dresses for the featured women (though not so much the mid-length putty numbers for the vast female corps) and there’s much to admire. The lead pairs were Chloe Misseldine and James Whiteside, Catherine Hurlin and Jarod Curley, and Sunmi Park and Carlos Gonzalez, all exhibiting impressive technique, and the women individual sparks.

Zimmi Coker, Jake Roxander, and Olivia Tweedy in Push Comes to Shove. Photo: Nir Arieli.

Speaking of which, Push Comes to Shove (1976) starred Jake Roxander in the vaunted Mikhail Baryshnikov role, in flame-hued silks and velvets, sporting and cavorting with the piece’s signature black bowler. Roxander does fine (no one can truly replace Misha), performing the subtleties of the opening phrase keenly before uncorking the mandatory pyrotechnics. He partners with the zesty Zimmi Coker, with Olivia Tweedy in a third featured, more reserved role. Tharp’s elevated melange based on ballet’s sturdy structure is peppered with idiosyncrasies, but other than the hat tosses and catches, never feels forced or awkward the way her jazzier vocabulary can feel self-conscious by classical dancers. Roxander exudes star quality; expect to see him a lot in coming seasons.

The third program led off with the world premiere of Juliano Nunes’ Have We Met?! The story holds promise: two compatible souls meet in the 1928 bodies of a woman and man, and again in 2038, reincarnated in different vessels. The first section features a soldier (Joo Woon Ahn) and an elegant gown-clad woman (Chloe Misseldine, riveting in every appearance), who dance among platoons of male and female soldiers. The urban setting implies New York City, somewhere in Brooklyn, with the main set elements, by Yousseff Hotait—a bridge, buildings— ingenious textile fabrications, parts of which evoke the South Korean artist Do Ho Suh’s fantastic “memorializations” of architecture and interior elements. The situation provides dramatic impetus for the couple’s romance, given the soldier’s limited time and potential fatal outcome. The troops dance fervently, moving en masse and creating a kinetic textural background.

In the second act, Isabella Boylston and Joseph Markey dance the leads, wearing color block unitards with flapping panels, now dancing in front of the Brooklyn Bridge and some ominous pencil buildings. While easier to read because of the design and color elements, the vocabulary didn’t feel markedly differentiated from the first section, other than a leaping hug by Boylston, clinging to Markey like a koala, and a repeating infinity symbol formed by spliced arms. Optimism—highly ambitious, given the current climate—permeates this section, lit brightly and paced briskly. But without a plot hook like the first couple’s twist of fate, there’s no drama, just an abstract dance with fantastic sets.

Unfortunately, pairing it with Alexei Ratmansky’s Serenade after Plato’s Symposium only emphasizes the roteness of the ballet vocabulary in the Nunes. Ratmansky uses movement—and all the permutations of the various combinations of the human body—to create something that feels like intense conversation. This work primarily for seven men puts each one forth, centerstage, to state their case. Even though we don’t know the content, we can sense their attitudes and approaches, and always their passion. With only the brief appearance of Sunmi Park as a kind of metaphor for clarity, Ratmansky was free to give the men softer, more expressive movement than ballet usually permits—and what a gift it is.

It’s back to core repertory with Balanchine’s Theme and Variations, featuring Catherine Hurlin and Isaac Hernández. The home-grown Hurlin handles the technical demands with elegance, and has developed a musicality and nuanced expression of epaulement that adds dynamism to the crisp ballet steps. Hernández is at ease with the classicism, lending a relaxed flair to the proceedings. Feels right to ground a program with some good old Balanchine, performed by two emerging stars.

To add to its New York presence, ABT will have its first spring season at the Koch in March 2026. Repertory will include Othello (Lar Lubovitch), Firebird (Alexei Ratmansky), Mozartiana (Balanchine), and Raymonda (Petipa).