Indeed, it's only that transformative quality that permits the choreography to sing.
Of the six dancers in "Gimp," some can do that, and some can't - and physical make-up isn't what draws the line. Lezlie Frye and Lawrence Carter-Long can do it. Christina Briggs, in this ICA performance, can't. That the first two have disabilities - one of Frye's arms is foreshortened, ending in a single digit, and Carter-Long has cerebral palsy - is, from an aesthetic perspective, beside the point. "Gimp" rises when it remembers that, and falls when politics makes it forget.
Thematically, "Gimp" is a musically driven geometric trek across bars of light into the nature of relationships - with ourselves, with another, with a group. Sextets beget solos beget duets, and so on. The score ranges from the clanging original notes of Marty Beller to the classical strains of Pergolesi and Handel.
When Carter-Long - knees turned in, arches lifted - clomps around the stage in wiry unstoppable squares, you feel simultaneously his isolation and intense independence, as well as his determination to connect. He embodies "fighting spirit" - one of the five definitions of "gimp" that Latsky lists on the program. We don't need to hear him announce, as he does before he embarks, "So, three cripples walk into a bar," or later, as others take the stage, "This has really changed me, to have permission to really look at you." What resonates is the man's kinesthetic presence - his ability to shape not only his limbs but the very space they're striding through.
The same kind of knowing strikes home when Leslie Frye executes a solo. She arcs back and swings her torso forward to Pergolesi, her face appearing - gleaming - between her legs at the bottom of the curve. Later, the finger on her foreshortened arm twists and turns and spirals tautly - you'd think the air would snap - coming to rest on her belly. Frye embodies "gimp" in another way: as in "to turn, vacillate, tremble ecstatically."
Latsky herself is a dynamo. In a duet with Jeffrey Freeze, she shakes her fists, shudders her arms, rolls her hips - now in a tangle with Freeze, now separately but in unison. It's a physical endurance test that goes on too long. "Gimp" shines when the dancers neither overdo nor underdo it - when they let their bodies, simply, speak.
