Let me tell you how awful Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s work was

Movement means nothing unless it has a context.

Walking down the street has an obvious context: you are going somewhere. You’re moving through a space—objectively real and subjectively perceived—toward a destination according to a purpose. Your gait, the path you choose, your physical reactions to the changing, passing environment: it’s impossible for any of this movement to be irrelevant.

In dance, context is wiped clean by the darkness of the theater before a piece begins. It has to be made on the spot, before the audience’s eyes. The choreographer’s task is to develop a synthetic context for their dancers’ movement either through references to or evocations of extra-performative reality or within the container of the performance itself by establishing movement and gesture and subsequent repetition and variation.

The risk is that, if the choreography and its performance don’t combine to form their own context, the movement will be meaningless, relevant to nothing. Yossi Berg and Oded Graf’s hour-long dance theater piece “Animal Lost,” performed June 14 in Duke University’s Reynolds Industries Theater at the American Dance Festival, is one of the most intensely irrelevant artworks I’ve ever seen.

Purporting to explore “stereotypes, misperceptions, and social clichés,” Berg and Graf instead almost willfully refuse to interrogate them. Instead they show themselves capable only of restating the same stereotypes and clichés that they’ve been consuming from popular culture, presuming that the fact of their performing the piece on an ADF stage will take care of the exploration by default. No dice.

What Berg and Graf accomplish is an incoherent mash-up of group movement improv and 7^th-grade poetry workshop fodder. They figure that if you just start moving, then you’ll eventually move in some significant way, and that if you just start saying then you’ll gradually say something. And that’s, like, gonna be deep and stuff.

The audience enters to a bare stage with a green curtain for a backdrop. As the piece opens, a female dancer in club clothes stands at the front of one side of the stage, holding a horse-head mask in profile against her chest. She delivers a rhymed, metric monologue that’s supposed to be seductive but is so facile and random that it’s embarrassing. And (this will become a theme) it goes on for way too long—in fact she repeats it. The text is brutally dumb but drew chuckles from the students in the audience, the kinds of chuckles you made when you read the inside jokes in all your friends’ signatures in your yearbook. Have an awesome summer!

The other five dancers in the company enter, wearing clubbing clothes and animal masks that cover the entire head: pig, rabbit, panda, penguin, horse of course, and either a polar bear or a wolf. They stand in place and all do a robotic hip-shaker gyration for way too long. Then they slowly begin undressing themselves.

I think this was supposed to be equal parts erotic and surreal, but it ended up being the dullest striptease of all time. Not-undressing is more erotic that what they did. And the clothes on a hanger in their closet would be much more surreal. Their movements showed neither precision nor humor, either. The curl of the unnecessary dry-ice mist across the stage in this section provided some of the most compelling movement of the evening.

And the masks. Their usage of the masks consisted entirely of merely putting them on. When the pig and rabbit made out with each other, they approached actually using the masks to mean something. But otherwise it was a mere novelty—something for the company’s poster in the lobby and the ADF ticket-sales printed piece. The masks were not used to interrogate identity and species, or to point out humanity’s membership in Linnaeus’ animal kingdom, or to explode the idea of rigid roles.

This work reminded me of those dress-up areas in children’s museums, with a chest of costumes and masks for kids to dig through, and a raised stage area for them to perform spontaneous shows for their forced-smiling parents: “Look Mom, I’m a rabbit!” Look-at-me is not a performance once you’re blowing out more than seven or eight candles on your birthday cake.

But the point-and-click pastiche continued. I think that Berg and Graf think they’re presenting the radical (read: maximal facetiousness) thought that identity is multiple and complex, and that a rapidly changing world accelerates the interaction between one’s inner selves and the selves one presents on the outside. Removing their clothes, pulling off and putting on their animal masks, stepping forward to deliver “I am” lines such as “I am a Hungarian lifeguard” and “I am a beauty queen from Venezuela, I used to be a man”—these are hackneyed signifiers that were coopted by authoritative bodies before these dancers’ parents were born. Think about Christine O’Donnell’s weird but affecting “I’m You” advertisement.

Or this equally creepy post-911 AdCouncil PSA

Or this Nikon ad.

Or this Orange ad.

Or this Microsoft ad.

And who could forget Nike’s retroactively psychosexual “I amTiger Woods” campaign?

I could go on with the links to ads, but the point is pretty clear that the “I am” listing thing was exhausted in Cicero’s time. It no longer holds water as a way of expressing many contained in one. Only someone who doesn’t read and doesn’t write would bother with it at this point. Only someone who watches a lot of TV and primarily interacts with humans via phones and laptops. Experience™, as it were.

And of course Berg and Graf went on (say it with me) way too long with it. Once they ran out of their own lines, they threw in “I am” lines from popular songs. I think I might have remembered my middle school locker combination during this part. They sped it up and made it louder, mistaking volume for complexity and speed for anxiety. Harder and faster, any sex therapist will tell you, is not the way to satisfy your partner. In fact you get a negative result; it’s a setback.

Speaking of partners, the only worthwhile part of the piece came through the partner dancing. Some of this choreography expressed multiplicity: attraction/repulsion, threatening/caring. Some of it was ambiguous in a way that made me want to think about it to see if I could draw a conclusion. Say, isn’t that the meaning of the word “provocative?”

So once they reached a frenzy, all the dancers predictably fell exhausted and went to sleep on the stage. The horse crawled back to her mic to sing, before the sleepers began writhing (didya see that coming?) and the pig began an urgent solo that might have seemed poignant and focused if what had come before it had in any way set it up. Instead it merely fulfilled the obligation of a solo for one of the lead choreographers—something for the curriculum vitae, not the audience.

The most common weakness of dance theater is that there’s not enough dance. Although this piece was lacking in that way, it’s real dearth was on the theater end. Every narrative decision was as facile as possible. This part was fast? Let’s put a slow part after it! We need an ending? Let’s do what we did at the beginning over again!

The horse repeated her opening monologue. Everyone put their masks back on and had a group hyperventilation. For way too long.

Then the backdrop opens slightly to reveal a small abstract tableaux, and the rabbit enters with an electric squirt gun, with which he rustles the other dancers to the back of the set. They all sing a little song together. And the endless 60-minute piece ends.

No part of “Animal Lost” can be mistaken for having intelligence or any political or historical awareness behind it. Dance-wise, it was so portioned out that it never made a statement. Theater-wise, it so lacked dramatic structure that I had to wonder if the choreographers even know what that is. They were so distracted by their toys (masks, disguises, and guns—wait, are they kidnappers? or bank robbers?) that they never used their minds. So their movement and words meant nothing. Afterwards, I was left wondering only what I was supposed to buy. Or rather, what product I should now boycott.