The Cage
“We all operate with some kind of cage that limits us and must learn to love
through- and with- that.”

On Saturday night Nov. 3, 2007 I saw the most beautiful interpretation of unconditional love I think I have ever seen. I fell in love with award winning choreographer Marie de la Palme’s The Cage. We are first met with dancer Fabienne Levenson who is inside of, you guessed it, a cage. She is animal-like, near naked, and expresses concern for her position. She is soon joined on the stage by a free leaping Evan Strand who stops curiously to examine this trapped female creature. Through athletic and primal movement they manage to touch and interact with each other enough to show the audience their feelings regardless of the very obvious barrier between them. The interaction is so captivating (no pun intended) because of the juxtaposition between the strength needed to achieve those gymnastic feats and the tenderness in their expression of feeling for each other.
The focus and title of this piece is the cage which made possible all of the acrobatics used in this dance. They flipped and climbed and spun all over that thing like children in grade school on the monkey bars, and yet not like those kids in that it was much more controlled and sophisticated. Evan’s horizontal hand stand was enough to make one question his humanness.
Using the familiar and ever intriguing Afternoon of a Faun by Claude Debussy to accompany them was genius to me. I know the score from the Ballet de Russe’s piece by the same name.