Act Naturally

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• Michelangelo Antonioni

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Seeing that it's Oscar season, motion picture — and moving-body — art beckons. And frankly, we’d find a contemporary refraction and reinterpretation of Michelangelo Antonioni’s beautiful, black-and-white L’Avventura irresistible any time. The visionary Italian director’s sun-drenched 1960 tale of amorality and alienation offers a master class in wealthy people acting like they don’t care. (They’re numbed by boredom and vapidity, not willfully cruel like today’s spoiled rich.) In Apparatus, the adventurous dance-theater troupe Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts performs the illusion of a cast and crew shooting a film (itself a two-dimensional illusion) while Antonioni’s masterwork unspools. The piece includes audience interaction, so attendees play the role of collaborator, and perhaps even participant, as well as spectator. It’s the best of all worlds: We get the risk and intensity of live performance, matched with the grammar of cinema that colors the way we all see and act (there’s that word again) in the world.
Feb. 25-27, 8 p.m., 2011