There is a moment of ecstatic abandon in Lara Kramer\u2019s Tame<\/em>. Two of the performers, Karina Iraola and Am\u00e9lie Rajotte, move objects through the space, and this motion develops into revelrous dancing. As the other dancer onstage, Angie Cheng, joins them, the scene rapidly intensifies. Cheng\u2019s enthusiasm modulates to rage, as she shoves Iraola onto a sofa, dashes objects across the stage, and screams viscerally. This sudden combustion just as quickly flickers out, and the piece returns to the dynamic it previously sustained: an ambulatory, almost sedate, slowness, both mesmerizing and disquieting. In a sense, this timbre is reflective of the work\u2019s provocative title. A term loaded with associative baggage, Tame<\/em> evokes enforced passivity, uncomfortable containment. The characters that inhabit the piece experience these constraints both conceptually and physically, on a stage overwhelmed with furniture, objects, and appliances.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her previous work, Kramer also foregrounded materiality and objecthood. NGS (\u201cNative Girl Syndrome\u201d)<\/em> enacted a sense of fraught attachment between the dancers and their object-filled strollers, situating this dynamic in a horizontally expansive stage space intended to evoke a city street. Alternatively, in Tame<\/em>, the relationship between dancers and objects feels more ambivalent, filled as much with desire as apathetic coexistence. Confined by so much matter, the women claim what little space they can. At one point, Iraola sits in an old wheelchair covered in paper, which crumples audibly under the weight of her body, sonically rendering the stage\u2019s fullness\u200a\u2014\u200aanywhere they move, the performers\u2019 bodies rub up against its cluttered materiality.<\/p>\n\n\n\n