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Though a lot happens in Sonya & Layla Go Camping, a mixed-media dance performance whose use of film, theater and sound is so predominant that calling it dance is almost misleading, in some ways what happens is beside the point. What’s really going on is all inside our heads, in the transformation of arbitrary detail into meaning, the exploration of how memories lodge in our minds and eventually take on personal resonance. For example, how does an image of God’s hands, starting out as big goofy Mickey Mouse-like hands attached to an unremarkable naked guy change from being completely silly to being a symbol for the creative spark that gives something like a dance performance life and an image that gives you goosebumps?

 

Like Celine and Julie Go Boating, the 1974 experimental narrative film by Jacques Rivette that this piece pays homage to, this performance consists of a retelling of the same story several times over. Each time the words are more or less the same, but the images and mediums in which the story is told change. The first telling is the most minimal, the most oblique and is the least dance-like of all. In fact, initially no performers are visible, just a stage on which several tents stand. We hear two women communicating by walkie talkie over a staticky connection. While some of what they say is incomprehensible, what is comprehensible doesn’t make much sense. They seem to be choreographing a dance piece. One woman is intent upon including a tape loop from a Peter Gabriel song. We also learn that there’s a 10-second segment that they just don’t know what to do with, and while joking around come up with an idea to fill the void: God’s hands coming down to touch them. “That’s kind of creepy,” says one. “What if God was just a pair of hands?” They giggle. “Giant Hamburger Helper Hands?” They laugh more. “White pillowy loving hands?”

 

 

And as if the saying of it has invoked his intervention, giant white hands begin to appear, swimming up from behind one of the tents, eventually revealing a naked man on the other end of them. He frolics around stage exhibiting a pompous air that is the more hilarious in that he’s not exactly an Adonis, doing a dance that includes a lot of hip sashaying to techno music. Need I mention that the giant hands play a giant part?

 

One of the protaganists then comes out to do the “hand dance” and the naked guy lays down and watches, eventually asking, “Have you guys ever thought of doing this show in France?” Et voila, we’re in Paris via a film projected on the wall. To paraphrase Yogi Berra: It’s like déjà vu all over again. Only now the  timbre of the story changes to a noir mystery, and includes scenes reminiscent of the film to which this piece is indebted. Scenes such as one in which one woman is taking a tram to the Eiffel tower while the other runs up the stairs along side it. The words they speak into walkie talkie are the same as before, almost: now they’re in French with subtitles. Later the story is told yet again in film, this time silently in a self-consciously serious art-house style in which dancers in tableau vivant in canoes pass each other on a lake shrouded in mist. In film and on stage the hands keep returning in different guises, once as two giant hand chairs each occupied by a dancer who is wheeled on stage in procession.

 

Another of the repeating and morphing elements is a soundtrack of amplified peanut crunching which eventually becomes a sitting-around-the-camp-fire activity. A group of dancers are gathered together on the floor, passing around a microphone and using it to capture the sound of peanuts being eaten. Layer upon layer of crunching creates a live rhythmic soundtrack. A dancer begins to dance in the most lyrical style yet and is joined by another. The moment was an epiphany—why I’m not exactly sure. It may have been because I’d been with the peanut crunching soundtrack through so many transformations that its finally becoming music felt like a graduation of sorts. I actually felt proud of the peanut crunching sound. Weird. Through layering and repetition, a superficial conceit—peanut crunching, big puffy hands dancing---gathers “depth,” literally accrues layers and significance.

 

The final incarnation of the central mystery of the hands of God is beautiful albeit kitschy and I’ll say little more than that so as not to spoil the revelation in case you are ever able to witness this show. One thing I’ll say though, is that it does include blacklight.