From beginning to end, Pepper Fajans & Brooklyn Touring Outfit’s Co.Incident is ingenious and captivating— they waste no time in activating every inch of the stage and infusing each moment with life and intrigue. From the fine-tuned choreography to the seamless and delightful use of objects and materials, Co.Incident performed at JACK in Brooklyn is a brilliant and witty performance created and choreographed by Pepper Fajans, dancer-puppeteer-carpenter and founder of the Brooklyn Studios of Dance in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn.
Fajans enters onstage literally straight out of the wall, emerging from underneath the camouflage of crinkled silver foil, a spectacular surprise that elicits delighted gasps from the audience. (JACK has in its existing state crinkled foil-covered walls.) When asked how he chose such an entrance, Fajans demonstrates the kind of thoughtfulness that makes this piece so successfully inviting and enjoyable. The opening section is meant to create “a shared experience and to automatically give the audience permission to enjoy what they are seeing.” And that it does.
The performance centers around a series of four duets with dyadic narratives informed by their real-life personal experiences and interactions. In Fajans’s first duet with Ilona Bito, the two convey the wonder and whimsy of childhood as they playfully balance ceiling-high rectangular boards with and between their bodies with care. At one point, Fajans and Bito’s backs are on the floor, their feet propped up on the tall panels between them. They pass the boards back and forth with their feet as if in a game of catch, but the audience soon realizes that this ultimately is a gesture of trust, familiarity, and responsiveness— if either one pushed too soon or quickly, the board would fall directly on top of the other person. Their playfulness and understanding of each other is rooted in reality: Fajans notes that they have known each other since their teens in Seattle and continue to work together in the Clinton Hill dance studio.
The second duet with Maiko Kikuchi, who also directed the performance, is equally playful and satirical, poking light fun at the rigid rules and dress code of a cumbersome administration, their movements reflecting Kafkaesque repetition and frustrations. Equipped with only two folding chairs, a desk, and a suitcase of papers, Fajans and Kikuchi offer an elegantly simple, smart and entertaining scene where balance is, again, key.
Fajans’s third duet with queer artist and nightlife performer Vic Sin is fantastically charming, complete with a “draglesque esthetic,” as Vic Sin’s very charismatic artist bio explains. Using large mirrored panels, together they successfully convey their individual sensibilities and quirks as well as the warmth and camaraderie they have for each other. The result is magical, inviting, and, simply put, great fun.
The fourth duet with Annie Young is also light-hearted and visually eye-catching—a game of hide-and-seek, a secret “pretend” conversation that culminates in delicate sculptures that Fajans builds from the long thin wooden sticks that Young playfully hands him from behind the mirrored panels. Fajans explains that it is inspired by their friendship in real life, having met at a coffee shop where Young works, where the two developed a way to read and communicate with each other and playfully act out varying scenarios upon greeting each other.
The piece moves organically and progressively like a carefully designed tasting menu. Fajans carries the narrative seamlessly from scene to scene. In the final scene he is alone, “a scene of closure,” he explains. In a Sisyphean task, he arduously carries and rearranges the unwieldy mirrored panels against his body, walking backwards over the spilled wooden sticks on the floor. He invites the audience to consider that transition from being with others to being alone:
In aloneness, what do you do? How do you keep yourself entertained without other people? Are you entertaining enough by yourself? Is the world around you fascinating enough so that you can maintain your curiosity?
Despite the difficulty of this solo sequence, he accomplishes it with both intensity and great equipoise. He pushes himself to the edge, but never takes on more than he can handle. In doing so, Fajans takes the audience on this rewarding ride of “flow,” a state described by positive psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi as a delicate point where one is challenged enough to be engaged, but not burdened to the point of being overwhelmed. Csikszentmihalyi explains:
The best moments in our lives are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times… The best moments usually occur if a person’s body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something difficult and worthwhile.
What Co.Incident achieves is such a moment— a moment greater than the sum of its parts. The performance offers the audience a deeply romantic and optimistic vision of both our individuality as well as our ability to connect, notice, and respond to each other. Fajans and the Brooklyn Touring Outfit have successfully distilled, elevated, and made universal the beauty and authenticity of our connections, allowing the audience to share in their joy. The performance reassures us that our ability to connect—our relationships with others as well as with ourselves—has, at its heart, the potential to offer immense trust, playfulness, curiosity, laughter, and, even when strenuous, resilience.