“What Remains” And The Frightening In-Between

There’s this moment one-third into What Remains, on at the Yale Rep through Feb. 16, where the house lights come down and performers’ costumes glow from black to red. Four bodies, a sea of loose, shimmering fabric, keep moving almost against their own will. Feet to the floor. Arms cutting through the air. Sharp folds at the waist and spine. Repeat, repeat. In the background, a low, rumbling synthesizer sounds as if it’s been punctuated by a heartbeat.

No one is there to tell you if the bodies are in the land of the living or the dead, in the past or in the present. No one is there to speak their garbled words into plain language. No one is there to stop them from moving—into each other, into the theater's walls, into the darkest parts of the stage. Maybe it’s supposed to be that way.

What Remains, which comes to the Yale Repertory Theatre as part of this year’s “No Boundaries” series, is a collaboration between poet Claudia Rankine and choreographer Will Rawls that first premiered in New York in 2017, after a commission from Live Arts Bard. Held together by four indefatigable performers, the work explores through voice, music and movement what it means to be systematically erased—without using so many words at all.

It runs Feb. 14-16 at the Iseman Theatre on Chapel Street. Tickets and more information are available here.

From the very beginning of What Remains—four bodies converge on a stage, half-chirping the word “you!”—the show is interested in the edges of human speech and movement. With didgeridoo vibrating beneath them, performers Leslie Cuyjet, Jessica Pretty, and Tara Aisha Willis and sound designer Jeremy Toussaint-Baptiste take the floor, communicating with each other in a language that does not belong to us, and does not not belong to us either. As they move, costumes by Eleanor O’Connell give them an other-worldly, almost spectral feel. They are humans but they are also already spirits, inhabiting the in-between.

In this world, Rankine and Rawls have moved beyond the poet’s own economy of language, giving the audience a new kind of lyric poem to wrestle with. In one sequence, performers harmonize a single word, picking it apart as they see how their voices can wrap around each sound and letter. In another, a grinding, train-like chug-a-chug-a pumps into the theater, and four bodies crouch to the floor, swaying with its rhythm. It grows loud enough to swallow the room, coming up through the floorboards and the chairs, and the four let themselves be overtaken. They thrash and bounce, drenched in noise.

It’s Rankine’s poetry—both Citizen, which came out in 2014, and her 2004 Don’t Let Me Be Lonely—stripped bare, adding fluid, sometimes chaotic choreography to an already-spare and cutting language that spans microaggressions to the very real whitewashing of history. The performers are both themselves and a kind of Greek chorus, spinning expansive sound and movement into story—of bodies lost, of lives lived in the in-between, of history that has wiped them from the record. But they are also not without joy: we get laughter and big, broad grins, the language of play surprising as it cuts in, and then vanishes as quickly as it came. 

Death hangs over each of them, sometimes spoken into being, sometimes danced out, sometimes harmonized. And in the audience, viewers have to work with this challenge: to reconcile the beauty of the performance with the pain and resilience that spawned it. 

While they occasionally share and sing anecdotes that anchor them back to this world—Pretty admits that she watches commercials for antidepressants in the dead of night, her words clean and sharp as she recites them—even those dissolve into fragment, becoming a halted language entirely of their own. Audience members are left to reckon with these places between silence and speech, as performers turn commonplace words and phrases (“you,” “no,” “fuck you” ) into a sputtering, breathy soundscape that holds immense and often bewildering weight.

What Remains feels long and heavy—sometimes interminably so—but maybe it’s supposed to. In one particularly memorable sequence, a performer recites the words “she did say it was okay to cramp/to clog/to fold over at the gut/to put hands to flesh/to have to hold the pain and to translate it,” each utterance becoming faster and faster, until the phrases are almost gibberish and the audience has no time to process the words at all. She folds and unfolds with the words, her body transformed into a soft and pliant thing over which she does not have complete control.

There's overlap with other contemporary works—William Kentridge’s Refuse The Hour, when Berlioz’ “Spectre de la rose” becomes distorted nonsense as it is sung backwards; Jamila Woods’ early poetry, when she was still performing on the college slam circuit; Jackie Sibblies Drury’s 2012 We Are Proud to Present and the writing of Homi Bhabha, by which Rankine has said she's been moved. But there’s also something frightening and new, in the way that we’ve seen this before but can’t figure out where.

As they reach a final sequence, performers triangulate on the stage, words and movements flying between them. They are of this realm, but also not—movements become wild, overwrought and desperate, sound is full-bellied in one breath and distorted in the next. They exit one by one, music still going, taking most of a minimal set up with them.

In the stillness that they leave, inevitably, what is left for the rest of us? What, indeed, remains?