Knock, Knock: Paracosm Dance's "Visitors"
Will you let them in?
A knock at the door. Will you let them in?
It’s one of the most primal human fears: making one bad judgement, and inviting danger into our own home. At its core is a question of trust. Can I trust this person? Can I trust my own judgement? We all take risks inviting people into our lives and safe spaces. But when the danger is not only emotional, but physical—and life-threatening—the stakes are irrevocably higher.
This is the fear upon which the recent blockbuster Sinners is based, and it also serves as the premise of No, I’m Not a Human, a new post-apocalyptic video game in which the player must use mere seconds to discern between people and “Visitors,” murderous humanesque frauds, when allowing entrance into their safe house. For a one-night-only performance at Phoenix’s Orpheum Theatre, contemporary dance theater collective Paracosm Dance used this premise to develop its chilling Visitors.
As audience members trickled into their seats, they essentially walked into the performance. With the curtain up, the intimate cast of Visitors chatted, lazed, and mulled about the stage while interacting with the piece’s stark set: a scaffold-like house furnished with a couch, bed, and table that allowed the viewer to look both inside and outside. In the back left corner, an imposing pile of old televisions topped off by the tip of a utility pole. The show had not yet officially begun, but heads turned inquisitively and folks double checked the time just to make sure. It became clear later, after two mic’d up player characters entered the theater house, that what we were seeing was the base function of a video game.
Once Visitors begins, Paracosm Dance founder Alyssa Johnson is the primary avatar. The players make their decisions through her, choosing whether to allow or deny entry, and later, how to address mistakes. It is a fraught performance. Characters cower, threaten, and weep. They throw themselves across the floor and onto one another, absorbing each other’s weight and momentum with dizzying speed. Each person, or Visitor, has their own backstory; in one particularly heart-rending case, a woman (Sarah Amstutz) hallucinates swing-dancing with her deceased lover, again and again, while the audience watches the gaping hole on his back, and the dried river of blood crawling down his shirt, twist and dip as he joins her in unreal turns, lifts, and jitterbugs. She is in complete denial.
One after another, the characters knock on Alyssa’s door. And while the audience understands that the players make the decisions, by the end of Act 1, it becomes evident that Alyssa may or may not agree with them. Some, in fact, seem to cause her immense distress. Suddenly, the viewer feels as though they are bearing witness to a structure that is fundamentally wrong.
Nowhere is the work’s uncanny, spine-tingling essence clearer than through the second Visitor, performed by Katherine Loxtercamp. On high relevé, her tall, spectral figure first emerges padding slowly, stalkingly, across the back of the stage. Her shoulders hunch forward, her head bowed, with her long, damp hair obscuring her face. Later, when she approaches the door, she places both wrists limply atop its frame, towering over it like a hanging corpse. It is a sincerely frightening image. But those inside the safe house cannot see out except through the door’s peephole; once Alyssa opens the door, the decision is made.
They let her in.
As an audience member, it’s clear that this is a fatal decision. It is, in fact, deadly; after a long, eerily enchanting pas de deux with Ethan Price’s character, Loxtercamp strangles him in the middle of the night. That dance begins with another terrifying visual: as Price sleeps on the couch, a spotlight suddenly illuminates Loxtercamp’s unearthly figure as she stands above him, hovering creepily, on the couch arm. The others sleep. But all throughout, they seem not to notice this figure’s obviously different nature from the moment she enters. Upon seeing Price’s dead body in the morning, they scramble and argue, panicking, until the players decide to have Alyssa shoot the hallucinating swing-dancer. She, too, was different. But she was innocent. The game is lost.
The piece does not end there, however. A young girl also comes knocking in the morning, but she flees at the sight of the corpses inside the house. Another Visitor, turned away earlier, drags the dead bodies of two humans who were also denied entry. She plans to burn them on the pile of televisions. The young girl is still out there.
The two players do not speak again at the end, which comes mildly and almost uncommitted, leaving the audience with a strange, unfinished feeling as the cast appears for bows. Through and through, Visitors is unsettling and thought-provoking. And its cast—a motley crew of highly-articulate, gorgeous dancers—made it spectacular. Both together and on their own, the main trio of humans (Johnson, Alicia Nascimento Castro, and Rayshawn Watkins) moved like violent water, or wind, as they flung, tugged, slid. Nowhere was there a moment of hesitation. And as Loxtercamp extended limb after limb, crawling and slithering, her legs became insect-like feelers. In terms of structure, some of the solos could have been trimmed, and a few of the duet and trio sections could have used more moments of stillness, or slowness, to complement the ever-churning mood of anxiety that permeated Visitors. But on the whole, the work was an indisputable success. It is a shame it ran for one night only.
I’ll not be surprised if I jump the next time someone knocks on my door.