Chapman’s Entanglements Resonates on Both a Human and Quantum Scale

“We’re in the universe and the universe is in us.” 

Resonating over projected images of the cosmos, Neil deGrasse Tyson’s breathy baritone poetically summarizes our connection not only to the stars in our vast universe but to one another. Science, it turns out, posits what mystics, spiritual teachers and artists have suggested all along: We are all connected.

Entanglements, which debuted this weekend at Midtown Arts & Theater Center Houston (MATCH) opens with deGrasse Tyson’s soundbyte as a thesis. Teresa Chapman’s choreography is concise, beautifully executed and, at times, quirky (as well as quarky), placing social and quantum entanglements under her microscope with intentionality.

Dance educators, I find, often make work that is textbook in the best of ways, mining for movement that feels familiar but not tired and ensuring even abstract ideas follow through. Chapman, who is also associate professor and director of the University of Houston’s dance program, adds empirical evidence to my theory, consistently presenting quintessentially tidy, satisfying and entertaining performances. She has assembled a cast of contemporary dance veterans and some relative newcomers whose technical and theatrical strengths enhance her practiced dancemaking. Highlighting the most remarkable qualities of her performers, whether blessed with superior control and whack-your-face leg extension or commanding stage presence and emotion-stirring delivery, she yet maintains her distinct choreographic voice.

Thursday’s opening night performance featured a series of solos, duets and trios bookended by nearly full-company works. Joshua DeAlba shone in an early solo titled “Atom,” his background in music emerging as he approached the adagio with mesmerizing sensitivity to Olafur Arnald’s lone piano. Sarah Havemann also wowed in a solo that maximized her extreme flexibility and control without exploiting it. Perhaps a nod to the theoretical 11th dimension, “Eleven” was set to spoken “principles” nonsensically sampled by The Books, whose oddball work emerged later in the night’s most comical entry, “Meditation.” Semantic satiation threatened to overwhelm the moment but Lindsey McGill commanded attention in a circle of four toppling, lotus-posed castmates.

Costumer Ashley Horn’s fingerprint is immediately recognizable. Overall, she’s chosen an uncharacteristically subdued palette of black, white and silver but her telltale patchwork of textures and embellishments is iterated throughout. She cleverly uses white tunics adorned with a swirling red, blue and green design during the trio Quark—a reference to the scientific color-coding applied to these elemental particles. Pops of color like these are entered sparingly. Jewel-toned skirts drape and puddle around Travis Prokop and LaRodney Freeman as the curtain rose after a brief pause in the program. They stood sculpturally with their bare backs to the audience. “Memento Mori” is a piece resurrected from Chapman’s 2021 work Sanctuary, it’s title a reminder of the inevitability of death. Its inclusion in Entanglements is a bit of a mystery but the work is so engaging that I don’t care. As the original score by Houston-based guitarist and composer George Heathco, who was in the audience on Thursday, builds to a climactic finish, Prokop and Freeman were striking in a work that was originally developed as a trio for three women. Having seen both versions, I can confirm that gender alters the effect little. The work’s power is in its concept and performance, and Chapman selects dancers who give their all to the latter.

Most notably during the evening’s duets “Opposing Forces” and “Cosmic Fragments,” Edgar Guajardo reshapes the performance space with shadow and light. Shuttered stage lamps create a series of squares that shift and reconfigure on the floor as McGill and Roberta Paixo Cortes interact in a literal and figurative dance of particles. The well-established partnership of these two dancers, who are the driving (if not yin-yang) energies behind their own company Group Acorde, seems fitting as they attract and repel in black and white, suggesting intertwined polarity at a human and microscopic level. A far more gentle and symbiotic exploration of relationship is present between twin-like dancers Jessica Luz Figueroa and Heesu Han in the contemporary pas de deux “Cosmic Fragments.”

“Evolution” begins Entanglements with the company moving like an amoebic cell—shifting, splitting away and reconvening—accompanied by the ambient drone and vocalizations of Anna Caragnano and Dontato Dozzy’s “Starcloud”. It ends with an energized ensemble striding, circling and merging over a hypnotic vocal-loop by the same artists. “When We Enter” is open to interpretation in Chapman’s hour-long scheme. It might refer to our emergence into relationship, the process of birth and becoming, the moment when two particles become intertwined or all of the above. Either way, Entanglements begins as it ends, with deGrasse Tyson’s assertion that while we are but small blips in an unimaginably expansive universe, we are made large through our entanglements with the star particles of space and connections with one another. I can’t think of a better moment in our timeline to be reminded.