There is something wonderfully transgressive about a dance based on James Joyce's legendary 1922 novel Ulysses.
Dancing is, after all, quite different than both spoken and printed words.
The most evocative thing about Headlong's Ulysses is the exhilarating rapport established between the original three company members, Amy Smith, Andrew Simonet and David Brick, and the new additions, Heather Murphy, Christy Lee and Nichole Canuso. One of Headlong's strategies in bringing the book to the stage is to make up improvisational games patterned after the many ways that the novel tells its story. In one beautifully effective improv, Andrew Simonet sits at the back of the stage and relentlessly questions David Brick and Christy Lee as they dance. In increasingly risky moves, Lee and Brick grab, lift, pull and roll over one another while attempting to answer Simonet's ever more sexually suggestive questions. In an ingenuous bit of stagecraft, the dancers' erotic tumbling slowly peels off the white draping that has covered the floor since the start of the dance.