If you have an iPhone and want to hear a computer evade a question, ask Siri to identify her race. She won’t do it. But even as she equivocates, her accent and intonation give you clues to answer the question yourself.
I was led to this curious exercise by David Thomson’s “he his own mythical beast,” a thoughtful and subtly provocative dance performance that had its premiere on Wednesday at Performance Space New York as part of the Coil Festival. Among the many disparate anecdotes related by the four dancers is an amusing story about trying to get Apple to create a black Siri.
Mr. Thomson is black, as are Paul Hamilton and Katrina Reid, two other members of the excellent cast. As Mr. Thomson proudly points out in the show, he has a beautiful speaking voice. For decades, he has been known as a dancer of extreme elegance. Here, he recalls an unnamed choreographer in the 1990s telling him with dissatisfaction, “I see you.” She wanted him to disappear into her work, he says.
You can guess who that choreographer might have been. Mr. Thomson was in the company of Trisha Brown from 1979 to 1993, and in “mythical beast” he quotes (with attribution in the program notes) from her 1975 work “Locus.” But identifying that source isn’t the point, really. The particular history of Mr. Thomson as a minority in the largely white field of postmodern dance is allowed to resonate with larger questions of identity.
When the fourth cast member, Jodi Bender, first speaks, her face is covered by a veil. Elsewhere in “mythical beast,” the whiteness of her skin is sometimes impossible to ignore, as in a sequence when she repeatedly shoves Mr. Hamilton to the floor, puts him in a chokehold and drags him around, once by the ear.
Yet even in this most on-the-nose part, it’s equally important (and complicating) that Ms. Bender is much smaller than Mr. Hamilton, and female. Often, the dancers are divided by gender, with the two women speaking while the two men move, or vice versa.
Formally, the most fascinating aspect of “mythical beast” is this interplay between dance and speech, two modes of communication that Mr. Thomson frequently presents as modes of conversation. Viewers seated on three sides of a long rectangle in one of Performance Space’s two new theaters are confronted simultaneously with action in the foreground and the background or to the side. Dance and speech can coexist, the work demonstrates, but four people speaking at once is a muddle.
It’s in the talking that spots of slackness and strain are easier to sense. (Peter Born, who did the sound score, shares credit with Mr. Thomson for direction and text.) Yet the anecdotes, some seemingly frivolous, begin to add up, and it’s a mark of the work’s oblique power that just when it seems to have forgotten about black bodies, it is suddenly all about them.
When Mr. Thomson, with his face concealed by a skintight mask, undulates on stiletto heels, swirling the skirt of his white dress to reveal his legs and more, what mythical beast is he portraying? Don’t count on Siri to answer that one, either.