Even if you think you don’t like avant-garde dance, you should still consider checking out PYLON III. Its predecessor, PYLON II, in 2016, blew the minds of the King Street Station crowd with its harrowing beauty and power. It felt at once zeitgeisty and like a cautionary tale with undertones of George Orwell’s 1984 on steroids. I’ve gone to two avant-dance events in my life, but PYLON II—choreographed by Coleman Pester and scored by Monika Khot—riveted me with its physical and emotional turbulence, even though I lacked the terminology to describe the dancers’ lithe contortions and fraught feints.
PYLON III marks the conclusion of Pester’s trilogy. Each piece examines “complex systems of control using highly physical choreography, architectural set pieces, and a variety of analog and digital technologies all together in a tense relationship,” Pester says. PYLON III‘s other collaborators include artists Alex Boeschenstein and Ben Chaykin, and writer/actor Stefan Richmond.
