If I had to categorize the French-Algerian choreographer Rachid Ouramdane, I’d label him an expressionist minimalist. I can’t think of anyone else to whom that tag applies in dance, and Mr. Ouramdane reminds me of nobody else. His vocabulary is small, but it suggests that he has urgent points to make that go beyond dance. He’s original, peculiar, limited, irksome, haunting.
In “Far…,” presented at Dance Theater Workshop in 2008, he created a strange documentary theater about political torture in which his dancing seemed to express a numbed state of post-invasion, post-traumatic stress syndrome. “Ordinary Witnesses,” shown at New York Live Arts in 2011, was partly a docudrama about people’s efforts to convey the effect of mass killings and political brutality, partly a dance quintet that suggested the wordless consequences of such violence on individuals.
The subject of “Tordre (Wrought),” the duet he is presenting this week at Baryshnikov Arts Center, is female self-revelation, and the production has a beginning, a middle and an end. The beginning and end are deliberately trite, with showbiz music; but the middle is separate, extended, odd. The start is a joke, a series of entrances in which Annie Hanauer and Lora Juodkaite keep returning to the stage to strike “Here we are” poses; the end, though with a few more steps, is equally conventional.
Between these sections, most of what occurs are extended solos. Ms. Hanauer, tall and lissome, has a left arm that is visibly artificial from the elbow down but deployed as an organic part of her motion. What’s memorable about her solos is the expressive way she angles her body between knee and neck: She leans, arches, tilts. Ms. Juodkaite, dressed in black tights and polo-neck sweater, spins around the stage for several minutes on end, more than once. As she spins, she changes positions of arm, head and upper body.
Although Ms. Juodkaite’s circuits of turns are certainly virtuosic, both these women present obviously restricted ranges of movement. Above their heads hang two wrought-metal constructions designed by Sylvain Giraudeau, sometimes slowly rotating. Stéphane Graillot’s overhead lighting casts the dancers’ shadows on the floor; you could say at times that we’re seeing the latest update of the famous “Pas de l’Ombre,” created by the choreographer Jules Perrot in 1843 for his Romantic ballet “Ondine,” in which the title character, a water spirit, is enchanted to find on dry land that she casts a shadow with which she dances.
But these “Tordre” solos are on the cusp of the soporific. I enjoy the frank calm of both these women — Ms. Juodkaite even talks as she spins — until it tips, repeatedly, into self-indulgence. Ms. Hanauer dances to an incoherent, rambling rendition of “Feelings” by Nina Simone, but Simone’s voice, even on a bad day, has a range of texture that are more compelling than anything here.
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