Friday, October 16th 2026
Review by Autumn Sagal
Walking into a warehouse surrounded by sheer white material and equipped with metal platforms and a cage felt as if the audience was walking into the lab of a mad scientist rather than a dance exhibition. As the piece’s performers emerged from opposite sides of the room, they too fit this narrative perfectly. Dressed in skin-toned leotards with strings of blue light tangled at the chest, the dancers looked like exoskeletal creatures with toxic insides, or better yet, cyborgs that somehow escaped mechanical completion.
This uncanny image is what the audience sits with, or rather clumps around given the venue’s immersive structure, for the whole hour-length work. Angela Hamilton of Twisted Element’s latest postmodern creation, Echoform, asks what makes us humans whole and whether the answer is actually connection with each other.
The first section of the piece watches the two dancers explore the space as these nonhuman entities, shifting their bodies in a jerky manner, “glitching” in a way that almost resembles a skipping record. As they continue to move about the space, their movements become more continuous, though still robotic in nature. What heightened the audience’s visceral reaction to the performance is what I can only describe as “faceography,” where the dancers would stretch their faces into extreme expressions of curiosity, sadness, disgust, and distress. At one point, they began to stick their hands in their mouths as if to physically draw out words they couldn’t speak on their own volition, a grotesque but ultimately fascinating demonstration.
As the audience got acquainted with the creatures, and them each other, the two figures began to dance as one, first mimicking each other’s choreography before ultimately joining together in a smooth, floaty waltz. When one performer broke away to exit the space, the other shuffled around in a stupor, almost begging different audience members to dance with her as her counterpart had before. Despite her best efforts, every audience member would back away or dodge her advances, eventually causing her to revert back into her glitchy, lonely exploration.
The true centerpiece of the work is it’s lighting design, a tag-team effort between Rodina Tabnak and Kelly Ross. The draping cloth, hidden LED wands, and strobing not only helped to direct the crowd’s attention, but also bridge that disconnect between the human and mechanical worlds. This seeped into the performers’ costumes, with the aforementioned blue light strings acting as a sort of life force for the pair, both performers frequently tugging at them as if trying to turn their insides out. This act of desperation made it all the more powerful when the two figures finished the piece being tied up with each other and supersized versions of these tangled strings.
This piece reminded me of a quote one of my dance professors would use in our dance making classes: “How long can you continue to do the same thing before someone wants to turn away, either out of boredom or discomfort?” This is a boundary that Echoform plays with knowingly; whether you find its movement arcs satisfying, unnerving, or just downright weird, it’ll have you pondering it long after you leave the venue. Though the experience of Echoform might seem foreign to some, the emotions it tries to invoke are universally human. If you’re adventurous and eager to see how far dance performance can be stretched, I highly recommend keeping in touch with Twisted Element’s events.
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