Terminus

Choreographer:  Nicole L. Olson

Performer:  Nicole L. Olson

In her new solo work, Terminus, Nicole Olson demonstrated once again why so few people are Nicole Olson. This was a site-specific piece, in this case designed to work with a narrow stand of trees which were wrapped in gossamer to represent a cocoon from which Olson, as chrysalis, struggled, accompanied by a pounding vocal version of White Rabbit that tipped us off to the elevated fantasy we were experiencing. At first unseen within and behind this cocoon, the activity became ever more frantic and violent until Olson eventually broke free and emerged into the evening air.

The moment she freed herself and appeared, the music and the mood shifted, became immediately pensive as she stood there, quaking, unsure, exposed to the strangeness of the world and this new, foreign self. Ever so tentatively, she began a process of exploration of this new body she possessed and the environment that it inhabited. She was living a series of startling moments, a creature with consciousness and perhaps some instinct, but no knowledge, like a babe thoroughly amazed the moment it discovers its hands and feet, with no idea what they’re for or how to control them. We see her take her first halting steps, touch and explore the ground. And because Olson is connected to and experiencing each of these moments, we share them vicariously. There is a deftness here, a subtlety in her actions that cues us into her own sensory processes as she accumulates awareness. There is a moment where she watches her hands flutter at the wrist, as if discovering wings or some precursor to flight.

This evolves into a full-bodied celebration as her being fully inhabits its world, moving with surety and abandon. However, there is a point so imperceptible that you need a rewind button to see when it all began to retard, her energy progressively decay until it became undeniable that a certain finality was upon her which she began to fight – at first hesitantly, then violently, and ultimately with more and more resignation, her gestures slowing, her body slowly crumbling, physicality failing her until she lies, literally face down in the very literal dirt, fighting for one final breath before her ultimate surrender, never to rise.

Be she creature, insect, fairy or fantasy – she was born, she grew, she fully lived, then faded and she died on this patch of earth, in this space of time, before our eyes. And because she was so present in each moment, so were we. Our vicarious participation allowed us to experience that dramatic beginning and ending, those preternatural struggles book-ending and clarifying the through-line, which was a constant urge toward life.

My hope is that this piece finds a permanent place in Olson’s repertoire and that what began as a site-specific performance, audiences may experience again under a variety of circumstances. This is one of those rare pearls that doesn’t just entertain but elevates the swine before which it is cast. Speaking as part of, and on behalf of, the porcine masses, I admit we may not be worthy of such work, but we are definitely richer for it. In Terminus, Nicole Olson exposed us to the wonder of discovering life as surely as she led us to experience its inexorable end – the sum of mortality. It was transcendental.

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