THE DANCE AND THE FIRE

In a pressure cooker of a city, three middle-aged survivors survey the wreckage of their adult lives.

Hallucinatory perception, the ephemeral nature of memory, and the intransience of art all come into play in this triptych of confessions from deepest Mexico. Here, Saldaña París leans less on the tragicomedy of the human condition to craft something a little darker and meaner about damaged people turning their hurt inward. The opener, “The Great Noise,” is narrated by Natalia, a disaffected and unhappy choreographer who often falls back on cruelty. She’s back home in Cuernavaca, barely tolerating her lover, Martín Argoitia, an aging art star-turned-bureaucrat. She’s become obsessed with an artistic vision that encompasses, among other things, the British occultist Aleister Crowley, hysterical Swedish witch trials, the pioneering German dancer Mary Wigman, and medieval incidents involving a “dancing plague,” all of which she intends to transform into a groundbreaking performance. The pinball of her teenage relationships is explored in subsequent sections with darker and darker undertones. In “A Clear-Cut Vision,” we experience many kinds of suffering via Erre, a failed filmmaker and Natalia’s high school boyfriend, who has returned in the wake of his divorce, suffering from debilitating nerve pain. He’s a cheerful lot, logging his symptoms in a notebook and haunting Cuernavaca’s desiccated parks, now under threat from encroaching wildfires. Erre’s passage ends before Natalia’s performance, but the final section, “Bioluminescent Beach,” visits their childhood friend Conejo, who divides his time between caring for his blind father and retreating further from the world. What exactly happens during Natalia’s performance is a mystery, but weeks later, Conejo describes a country just now recovering from a mass dancing outbreak. It doesn’t make all that much sense but it’s dark as a bad dream and—let’s face it—its slippery nature is certainly part of the point.

The show’s over, ending with not much of an aftermath except ashes and regret.