Extraordinary Dancers Bring an Eerie Mood to the Pillow

What is it about puppets this year? For two weeks in a row, there has been a puppet at the center of a dance piece at Jacob’s Pillow. Both were of course metaphors for something more — the inner life of the creator, the forces beyond our control that move and affect us. If last week’s white cloth puppet was a little girl’s dream, the wooden man in Kidd Pivot’s “Dark Matters” was the stuff of a grown-up nightmare, more akin to Chucky than a child’s plaything. Kidd Pivot, the German-based company led by Crystal Pite, was last at Jacob’s Pillow two years ago with another evening-length work. In “Dark Matters,” which is billed as a “dance thriller,” a scientist sits at a work table, painstakingly building a puppet from cardboard. Stark lighting and hand-drawn sets create a mood like an episode of the “Twilight Zone” or an Edward Gorey drawing. When the puppet is complete, four puppeteers, dressed in black from head to toe, use poles to make it move with more specific gesture, weight and detail than any I’ve ever seen- it’s a breathtaking feat. The puppet, at first a friendly companion, becomes annoyed and clingy, and then angry and vengeful, when the creator attempts to leave for the evening, in vignettes both creepy and very funny. A “Matrix”-like fight breaks out (Pite’s dancers can do things other humans can only do through the miracle of CGI) and soon puppet and creator are both dead on the floor, the ruins of the home having fallen down around them. The story is only beginning. Now the puppeteers, who have been barely noticeable up to now, take center stage. The second half is less plot, more dance, with most of the dancers now in street clothes. Only one (Sandra Marin Garcia) remains in black puppeteer garb, which she sheds at last for a final duet. Pite’s choreographic style is so rapid and flowing it feels like improvization. One of her techniques is particularly well suited to the theme: Dancers manipulate each other’s bodies to initiate movement, or push or pull their own limbs to start or interrupt a sequence. So, every dancer seems, at times, to be puppetlike, controlled by unseen strings. The love, and tension, between creator and created, or parent and child, or the living and the dying (more than once there is a Pieta-like moment) is explored in a relentless progression of moves. Pite’s dancers, led by Peter Chu as the scientist, are extraordinary. There were many moves that seemed just impossible, even more considering how effortlessly the dancers made them look. Jermaine Maurice Spivey leapt, landing on Yannick Matthon’s single raised hand; Matthon propelled Spivey across the stage while Spivey’s legs churrned like a bicyclist — just a tossed-away moment in a two- hour piece that left me shaking my head in amazement. Owen Belton provided the excellent soundtrack: gloomy music, thunder, mechanical clanks, along with snippets of a poem by Voltaire, read in Vincent-Price-like fashion. Pite is the winner of this year’s $25,000 Jacob’s Pillow award, so it was a bit odd that her work was shown in the smaller Doris Duke Theatre. Pillow director Ella Baff has said that it was staged there because the work’s intimate scale was more appropriate for a more intimate setting but important moments in the action took place on the floor, where nobody behind the first row or two could see it. However, what was visible was mesmerizing. For information on upcoming events and tickets, call 413-243-0745 or go to www.jacobspillow.org.