Koresh Dance presents Darkness Dancing into Pieces

Terror and grief

Koresh divided Darkness into nine parts, with titles like “Darkness” and “Depravity,” but also “Points of Light” and “We Shall Dance Again.” Fittingly, “Darkness” opened the scene: Mia Davis, in a thigh-length white shirt, ran frantically across the stage. At the back of the stage, dancers in rusty tops and loose pants lurked ominously in the shadows, while Sage DeAgro-Ruopp’s music shifted from guitar and voice to a driving, urgent beat, like a clock ticking down. More dancers in white entered, with the sounds of gunshots and falling bombs in the music’s foreground. They raised their arms, elbows bent in a classic “hands up” pose, and pushed as if shoving away some attacker. They fell as if dead, then rose, and fell again.

Throughout the piece the dancers expressed the grief and terror of the music: Koresh’s loose hips and arms would become a deeply contracted core, with hands upraised or covering their faces, as if weeping. Sometimes, it seemed they might be puppets on a string, or marching into the fray, all performed at a breathtaking speed. Sections blended into each other, so there were no obvious breaks between them. In the transition from “Darkness” to “Clouds of Unknowing,” the company gathered in a tight circle and when they dispersed to the wings, revealed dancers Paige Devitt and Savanna Mitchell. Under cover of the circle, they had shed their loose pants and wore tight white shorts for their duet, rolling over each other’s backs before they were joined by a second pair, Melissa Rector and Devon Larcher. Lifts throughout heightened the sense of danger—they often felt deliberately awkward, as when carrying a partner on their bent back, or shifted from comfort to attack, to escape.

Picking up the pieces

The section “Hex” was named after the Greek word for six, and the six dancers represented the hostages who were found shot in September 2024. In the after-chat, DeAgro-Ruopp told us in that she had visited the dance studio just after the news broke. She hadn’t heard yet, but picked up on Koresh’s mood and wrote it into the score. When Koresh heard the music, he used it to choreograph the desperation of that moment, with the dancers holding their clasped hands out as if bound. The evening ended on a note of hope, with the ten dancers, now in white, dancing together with a forward half lunge that rolled into a back step.

Before we saw the central piece, the Koresh Youth Ensemble, made up of dancers between the ages of 13 and 18, performed Melissa Rector’s Fractured, set to the music of Fabrizio Paterlini and Rival Consoles that ticked like a metronome. It opened with the dancers on their knees and closed with the seven in an outward-facing circle, hands linked over their heads. The piece fit the somber mood of the evening and the seven dancers performed it admirably.

But ultimately, we were there for Darkness, and it was an emotionally grueling experience with just a glimmer of hope. Talking to the audience, Koresh said that he hoped the performance was entertaining, but that art wasn’t meant to be entertainment. Art can tell the artist’s truth and can push us to expand the way we think about the world, but it is not always comfortable. Like the piece itself, my feelings about it are complicated. Days later, though, I’m still thinking about it.