Alexandra Pirici Co-Natural at New Museum

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Alexandra Pirici's new piece "Co-natural" is a labyrinth of choreography and words with live dancers and a holographic image of a man. The show's objective is to display fragments of the body and the mind, the division of nature from culture, and the separation of presence and self. The hologram as a fragment of a whole reveals ways in which images and live bodies influence each other— a reflection of digital technologies as mediators of presence.

The dancers are situated at a distance from the hologram; which at one point I wondered if hologram was completely a different piece by itself. The juxtaposition, however, becomes powerful once one of the dancers elegantly lifted his hand and pointed to the hologram, explaining that it is an image of a physical body powered by electrical lines. Though the connection was made, I found the authoritative recitals conducted by the dancers more thought-provoking than the ghost of a body in a pyramid. The dancers spoke of dozens of subjects during the hour-long choreographed spectacle. One of the subjects was a list of exotic animals and their prices, all spoken monotonically by the dancers pulling their best stoic faces- and when the sentence “slave, 1200 Libyan dinar” discharged with an apathetic voice, it was clear that Pirici was trying to criticize the societal indifference on associating bodies with a value. The piece would perhaps be stronger without the hologram hovering in the corner of the room.