The Joyce Theater, New York, NY.
November 8, 2025.
GALLIM, the interdisciplinary arts organization and contemporary dance company led by Andrea Miller, presented an evening-length work at The Joyce Theater in November 2025. In the company’s latest work, MOTHER, Miller “confronts what she calls the ‘Apocalypse of Matter’: our growing distance from touch, skin, and organic surrender.” MOTHER is a journey of thoughtful whimsy and curious surrealism, brought to life with an original score by Frédéric Despierre.
Miller’s work has a distinctive quality and aura to it, and this production carried those elements throughout. The stage had a simple backdrop with a striking black gash in its otherwise white continuity. It’s both a calm entity and one of power and possibility – anything could come through that gash and burst onto the stage. Spoiler alert: nothing does. But what did come onto the stage was indeed profound and magnetizing. The times I’ve seen GALLIM perform have left me with the same thoughts…that I’m not certain I understand what I was supposed to, and that it probably doesn’t matter.
The thing about dance is that it touches us in ways words cannot. We feel things we can’t describe. In this work, that idea kept coming back to me – the fact I felt something, and the (unfortunate, as a reviewer) fact that I struggled to find the words to convey those feelings. I felt a sense of birth, the struggle of it, and the mystery of it. I felt the tensions between the dancers as much as I felt the unity and flow between them. Movement-wise, the dancers employed both ballet lines and deeply intuitive noodling, the combination of which was pleasing to witness.
Costumes (Orly Anan) accentuated this sense, unitards or leotards with mesh, revealing form without nudity, and in various degrees as the lighting changed. At one point, a large creature joined the cast of slithering forms – an all-white being, dressed in fringe from head to toe. Imagine an overly excited snowman dressing up as a flapper for Halloween, but that also might be a ghost? In this tale, the snowman/flapper/ghost started off as friendly but became more complicated as the piece progressed. Not unlike life.
The humanity of MOTHER is that we are all creators of something. The dancers onstage did not embody traditional roles all the time (although sometimes), but did embody the sense that they were both a group and also individuals at different points. Driven by the trance-inducing score of Despierre, the work draws in the audience in ways that transcend language. Even though I would have enjoyed a bit more punctuation of sound or movement to break up some of the trance-like qualities, journeying to this world of esoteric creation was a pleasant trip.
By Emily Sarkissian of Dance Informa.
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