The Reach and Limit of a Work-Life Balance – Isabella Mireles Vik presents Human Resource: Corporeal Experiences in Professionalism

Performers: Ariaza Ariaza, Lindsay Cortner, Gabrielle De La Rosa, Isabella Mireles Vik
Sound piece: Jamie Hernandez 
2024 Texas Biennial, Blaffer Art Museum/Dudley Recital Hall, University of Houston
October 17, 2024

Just a year ago, the Dance Dish ran an artist highlight on Isabella Mireles Vik that described her work as visceral and challenging, potentially disturbing to an audience. Presenting her quartet, Human Resource, at an evening of performance art seems like a good fit for this kind of work.

A lot can happen in a year and an individual work can develop without regard to expectations or past patterns. What Vik brought to this evening that also presented improvisational vocalizations and electronic sounds was a solid piece of contemporary dance without the rawness described in the earlier Dance Dish profile.

Not that her Texas Biennial piece was in any way sugar coated. The piece opens with the four dancers entering the stage in office attire, some more formal than others. They sink to and rise from the floor. The percussive music gives a foreshadowing of emotion coming or maybe already present.

A series of phone messages play. One is in a foreign language. Another is a debt collector. One is from a feminine voice, offering to get together to catch up. One more from a masculine voice threatening to embarrass her at work like she did at a bar. The messages are deleted.

That last message is clearly unsettling and if the dancers are in a work setting, they are not ready for the messages. The music and movement styles shift and change. Sometimes the dancers are performing a solo piece, working through the emotions of the workplace interruption. Other times, there are duets with dancers partnering in support or, occasionally, what appeared to be disregard for the turmoil of the other. Often all four dancers were on stage, moving in and out of unison and individual phrases. There was one arresting section of sound with electronic music that brought to my mind of being under water, bubbling but mechanical.

The dancers grow agitated as the music does likewise. With flat hands, all four slap the upstage wall, pounding it, taking out frustrations. The movement becomes harsh, muscular, resembling (if not outright mimicking) martial arts. As the music shifted to what sounded, to me, like a punk girl group, shout-singing an anthem of self-expressed power, the movement becomes bounces and jumps, like pent up energy about to make a popcorn kernel explode. Abruptly, two of the women exit upstage through doors in the wall and two run out the aisles between the audience seats. It is as if a decision, slow in coming, was executed swiftly and with finality.

Human Resource is a short piece, just under 30 minutes and it is a compact work. Vik and her dancers create a world of stuffy business life and complicated personal life with so little time for buildup. It’s impressive. It’s also impressive how much is not said but might be seen in the work. It’s an odd time for the business world, where negotiations around work-from-home are often in the news and more than half a century after the sexual revolution, we’re still having conversations (and arguments) about gender politics in the workplace. Scenes from my 1970s childhood and from the COVID pandemic vied for my attention as I watched.

It’s been a while since I’ve seen dance in the context of a performance art festival and I thoroughly enjoyed that aspect of the evening, but I was most taken by the way the dance came off as both the most conventional form of the evening and the most layered and thought provoking. I’m not sure I’ve seen Vik’s work before, but I’m hopeful for seeing more.