A large block of ice, a ladder, a cage, a blaster-radio, the men, and a car litter the dance's surface -- a square parking lot, off Market and west of Van Ness, bordered by squat warehouses. The elements in Ice/Car/Cage -- a dancing still-life -- remind us that cars and ice and radios and other useful blocks are the fruit and flowers of our millennial age.
The car at the center of the work's canvas sets the men in motion. Early on, someone gets in, drives it in a circle, then gets out. The car keeps going. Around and around and around the parking lot it rumbles while the men follow, somersaulting backward over its roof and rolling, with a thud, off its back. They spin along the car's sides, leapfrog over its hood, and let the rolling tires graze their heads as the car, oblivious, keeps to its circular course. The dancers are caught in the car's monotonous rhythm, as if it were driving them.
The dance with the car -- it setting the terms and the dancers becoming its extension -- is the model for other interactions in the work, both between people and objects and, in one section, between the dancers themselves. A 4-foot block of ice determines this scene's shape. In a perfect fit, Hennessy lies, face-to-face and hip-to-hip, on top of Curtis, who slips gently back and forth on the ice. Later, Hennessy becomes a childlike mechanic, and Curtis a mechanism. Curtis is still belly-up on the block of ice -- his legs now bent like a bug. Hennessy spins Curtis by the foot, as if it were the handle on an ice cream maker. Like a kid scrutinizing the springs of a clock, Hennessy watches Curtis go: How does this man run? Like another driverless car -- give him a little push and he'll spin on his own.
On first reflection, Ice/Car/Cage seems to be about humans turned into machines. The men respond more to the car than to one another, letting it determine the shape of the dance. And the men's presence is very quiet, muted under a soundtrack and accompanying found sounds: a loud, low-pitched refrigerator buzz; intermittent Chopin Nocturnes from the portable radio; the chugging of the car; and the subterranean clatter of the nearby Muni. The only sound from the dancers is the thud of their bodies hitting pavement. But what keeps the men revolving around the car -- and hushed -- is not oppression but some inarticulate desire to blend and mesh with their environment, even a postindustrial one. They don't want to stand out like some bad-ass, flaming red Firebird; they want to melt into a block of ice or hum like an engine. Ice/Car/Cage's stark beauty conveys the integrity of that desire and then goes further, suggesting it is an impulse toward freedom: The piece begins with a man let out of a cage. Liberated, he rushes to dance with a car.
-- Apollinaire Scherr
