Birds with Sky Mirrors is an interpretive dance performance, which automatically means it’s gonna be great. To preface the following review I would like to say that I acknowledge the fact that people like me were not the target audience for this performance. Though they were few, there were several standing ovations, so it did get a message across to some. I’m trying to justify this performance and all that’s coming to mind is that it was made for people who enjoy dance so tremendously they’re willing to sit through an hour and half of torture to see the four seconds of Chinese ribbon dance that were snuck into this performance. On a serious note, I think one can only truly appreciate the performance if they have an extensive knowledge in dance.

If your friend dragged you out to see a show she’s dancing in or working on the creative process of and it ended up being Birds with Sky Mirrors you would have a very difficult time after when she asked you how you liked it? “Um…the lighting. The lighting was out of this world!”

I attended a New York City public high school. Funding was always low. And the arts were constantly receiving the short end of the stick. Every year there’s a student written, directed, and performed show called SING!. During rehearsals, performers are trained to react to technical difficulties. The specific technical difficulty that is inevitable is static from the sound system. This year instead of attending SING! I went to see Birds with Sky Mirrors. I would like to know who was in charge of making the soundtrack? BAM has the funding to provide for equipment that doesn’t produce static during the performance. The producers of this performance for some reason decided the soundtrack would be almost exclusively static. This was definitely headache-inducing.

Back to the idea of not being the target audience for this performance, the plot was extremely unclear to me. When I say plot I don’t mean a storyline. I mean just any event or emotional change that occurred in the characters. Were they even characters? I think the most I could tell you is that at some point, who I assume to have been the lead female character was going through some emotional distress when she started screaming very suddenly and loudly. It is to my understanding that the choreographer has done dances with political inspiration, but having watched this piece I couldn’t begin to tell you what the intention was. A New York Times article by Siobhan Burke says the dance was about the “threshold between life and death” but I don’t think I would have ever gotten to that on my own. 

I think what is really upsetting is that the dances were well executed. For the most part every one was in sync with each other and there were bits when the dancers showed a great amount of precision and skill. If it was bad dancing it would have been a different story all together. It’s frustrating because they had the potential to do a really great dance with a more evident plot and music that didn’t make you consider suicide. 

Performances have different engagement levels. The best kind of show will have you enthralled and completely out of your own world and the only thoughts you’ll be having will be relating the ideas displayed to the world outside the theater. Next we have shows that every once in a while your mind will side track and you’ll be thinking about the cheesecake you had last week. Lastly we have the show that doesn’t engage you at all and you’re having a complete internal monologue or building your schedule for next semester. I think every show I’ve ever seen falls into the spectrum of these categories. I don’t even know where on the spectrum this show would fall because I didn’t find myself enjoying the performance but it was entirely impossible to have any other thoughts because of how demanding the performance was. Perhaps that was the intent.

Early in the performance a woman comes out onto the stage topless. She disappears and returns completely naked. The man who is on the stage at the same time is partially clothed and I immediately thought about the over-sexualization of women. Later in the performance, a man is completely naked on the stage except for his bird mask. One might think that both genders are represented in a sexualized manner. But something that stood out to me was that the woman’s nudity was marked with spotlights from several angles and she walked across the stage in a catwalk manner several times. When the man was naked he stood towards the back and slowly rotated. The lights were dimmed and limited to his upper body. The sexualization of the woman was more prominent and almost flaunted while the man wore a mask while naked. Perhaps if I had understood the context of the performance I would be able to understand why this happened as it did. 

The star of these piece was the finale. Okay, imagine a yo-yo who’s string has been replaced with a short thick rope. The discs on the bottom have been replaced with a flour filled spherical cheesecloth. Now imagine meticulously dusting the entire surface of the stage with this flour. One square foot at a time. Ten minutes. That’s how long it took for four people to dust the floor. This was so ridiculous that it couldn’t have been purposeless. There had to be some deeper meaning. 

This single photo accurately sums up the entire performance

This choppiness of this review was meant to represent on a much smaller scale the roughness of this performance. Unlike the performance, however, I hope readers may leave with some understanding of what has been expressed.