Silk Road
A.C. Petersen Dance
and House of Dames at
Consolidated Works, 720-5252. $16.
Through May 5.

This dance performance dissolves the voices, stories, dreams, and hopes of Asian and Central American immigrants into poetry--distorted poetry. Occasionally a story or thought rises to the surface of clarity, but, before it's fully articulated, returns to the depths of the dancers cryptic movements. At one point, the dancers stop and all together attempt to tell the actual stories of the immigrants. This, of course, makes it hard to understand a single narrative, but poetically (and successfully) it expresses the general mood or condition of the immigrants.

Silk Road is not, however, entirely incomprehensible. It's set in a sweatshop, where the immigrants endlessly, soullessly produce glamorous garments for American department stores. So, in the middle of all this fluttering poetry, Silk Road has a definite social project, which is to address the exploitation of poor women in the global economy. Luckily, this is not what makes Silk Road compelling. We know about sweatshops; we know about how women slave for hours in hellish conditions. And no interpretive dance could improve our knowledge of this terrible fact.

What makes Silk Road worthwhile is that it takes place at Consolidated Works. This produces two pleasant and paradoxical effects. On the one hand, the poetic and sensitive performance is contradicted by the hard and industrial interior of Consolidated Works. As a consequence, the dance and the space seem strange and unfamiliar, in the same way that a boxing match in a beauty school would defamiliarize both the brutal fight and its elegant context. On the other hand, because Consolidated Works looks like the kind of place where an unscrupulous capitalist might operate a secret sweatshop that abuses immigrant workers, at times the border between art and reality is blurred.

Finally, the music in this performance is dramatic and beautiful. Particularly the song "Fashion," written by Garrett Fisher and A. C. Petersen (the choreographer) and performed by a dazzling soprano named Allaina Lewis. The melancholy lyrics ("dare I thread the hope of tomorrow/must I carry spools of sorrow"), melodic piano, and powerful voice lift the performance into the air and carry it to its shimmering conclusion.