Two Blistering Solos Raise the Stakes at Live Artery

Symara Sarai, like a hurricane, tore up the stage in her aptly named solo “I want it to rain inside.” She made it storm. In another solo on another stage, Leslie Cuyjet, methodical and refined, commanded a different kind of attention with her flawless pacing and nuance. Her “For All Your Life” was a tour de force.

These two rare meetings of the body and the mind made for a day to remember last week at Live Artery 2025, a festival of contemporary dance and performance, which aims to push the limits of creativity, of genre, of form. This year the ambitious event, presented by New York Live Arts, features events on-site and off.

Sarai’s “I want it to rain inside,” presented in a studio space at Live Arts, was a homage, in part, to her father and his roots in the American West and South. (There was a maternal layer, too.) In the dance, which delved into cowboy culture, Sarai layered improvisation with set material, sometimes addressing the audience and sometimes ignoring it as she charged across the space as if possessed.

Her ability to slip behind and in front of the fourth wall was a delight. At one point, she pulled out a rope to perform two lasso tricks inspired, ostensibly, by her father. “My daddy was a trickster,” she said. “And just like my daddy, I like tricks.”

Nailing the second took a couple of do-overs — smart shows, she said, “invite success and failure” — but eventually she expertly twirled the rope until it danced around her body. Such interludes struck the right contrast to Sarai’s daring dancing and her vigorous interactions with folding chairs.

She continually pushed her physicality: After a precarious backward lean, she crashed onto the floor. Balancing on one leg, she stretched the other high into the air and then slowly lowered into an arabesque — her control was stunning — before dropping out of the position with a yelp. During one frantic passage, she yanked a curtain back, which revealed a mirror: “You look amazing!” she told her reflection. She did.

Another amazing sight was Cuyjet in “For All Your Life,” in which she examines Black life and death as they relate to the life insurance industry. There is a personal connection: Cuyjet’s great-grandfather was the president of a Black-owned life insurance company. The solo, first seen at the Chocolate Factory Theater in Queens and now at the Center for Performance Research in Brooklyn, continues Cuyjet’s impressive body of work exploring aspects of her lineage.

Throughout, Cuyjet melds her finely wrought delicacy with a simmering fury. In a film and onstage, she plays an insurance saleswoman. With every raise of her eyebrow, every confiding smile, she is corporate America at its worst: frighteningly good.

The film portion, directed by Daniele Sarti, touches on the history of the life insurance industry and how in the 19th century policies were sold on the lives of enslaved people. Cuyjet leads an insurance seminar; she hosts a home shopping show with questionable products; and, magnificently, she plays a pair of female clones buried up to their necks in an artful arrangement of brown paper bags.

But when the actual Cuyjet takes center stage, her physicality and cadence are so powerful that the work gets to a place where horror and humor meet. Her body is instilled with harrowing precision — from her gestures, barely there or over the top, to her exuberant, defiant dancing. When she stretches her arms behind her back like wings it’s as if she were yearning to separate her flesh from her spine.

She weaves life into dance and dance into life. How is art valued? How is a life valued?

Other offerings at Live Artery weren’t as memorable. Milka Djordjevich’s “Bob,” at the Live Arts studio, was an excavation of the female body in the artistic marketplace. Djordjevich’s own body, shown at various angles as she performed repetitive movements — many with more than a whiff of a workout — was front and center.

Objectification was part of the point. But even as she pushed her body harder, the choreography remained stuck in its well-worn patterns of prickly footwork and angular arms. Its relentless repetition had a way of droning on, which was also a problem in Julia Antinozzi’s “The Suite,” performed at Triskelion Arts in Brooklyn.

Antinozzi, who started out in ballet before making her way to contemporary dance, digs into George Balanchine’s “La Sonnambula,” a haunting ballet about a Poet who encounters a Sleepwalker at a masked ball. But in “The Suite,” she pulls out elements or feelings from the ballet without suturing the remains together in a way that adds up to a greater whole — for either classical or modern dance. Antinozzi, clearly, is a lover of steps, but the way they were packed into her dance and played on repeat made the experience airless.

The Congolese dancer and choreographer Faustin Linyekula has said he thinks of himself foremost as a storyteller. His “My Body, My Archive,” presented in partnership with the Under the Radar festival at the main theater at Live Arts, explored his female ancestors through the knowledge, or archive, of his body. How can a body reveal its past in ways that words cannot? While “My Body” had qualities both modern and ancient, its pacing was uneven and it had the air of fulfilling an assignment. But the bond between Linyekula and the musician Heru Shabaka-Ra was real; as Shabaka-Ra played the trumpet, he haunted the stage with his lanky presence and his sound, which at times filled the space like mournful wails.

Objects, in the form of eight wooden sculptures by Gbaga, figured prominently. At various points, Linyekula cradled them in his arms and spread them out on the stage. While inanimate, they became something like ancestors, silent and watchful, as Linyekula and Shabaka-Ra crossed a stage that had been covered in coffee grinds. By the end, patterns tattooed its surface like a map of memories.

With quivering hands, palms forward, Linyekula — from the start — moved with a force undulating from within, both fitful and erratic yet plushly soft. The work itself was never as transfixing as Linyekula was in it, but perhaps that makes sense: An archive doesn’t have a chance over a body.

Live Artery 2025

Through Jan. 18 at various locations; newyorklivearts.org.