Quaba V. Ernest “Huis Clos”
Dancing Futures Residency, Bronx Academy of Arts and Dance
By Sarah Cecilia Bukowski
The atmosphere is dark, yet not sinister or oppressive, shadowed only by the relentless tick of
the clock. Time, inexorable: sluggish with waiting, rushing with expectation, holding ever true to
its cold and measured pace—tick, tick, tick.
A constellation of characters moves through scenes marked by shifting arrangements of order
and disorder, each one a beacon that casts their beam outward to illuminate their world and, at
times, shine light onto one another as witnesses or interlocutors. Theirs is a world of passing
encounters—such is the nature of the hotel—and each remains set on their own journey,
wandering or resolute, even as their entanglements grasp for substance and meaning beyond
their ever-present loneliness.
A voice in the darkness floats on streams and eddies of poetic ruminations; he is the hotel’s
porter: the unseen and all-seeing, the overlooked and always-looking, the busy mind and
wayward heart of this world. He and the fractured quartet of guests speak with their bodies,
through torrents of movement and urgent bursts of phrases punctuated by sudden pauses like
interrupted thoughts. The piano becomes their inner monologue in stormy, rumbling fugues and
melodies tinged with preening angst and momentary pleasure. Low-slung swirls converse with
grasping rises that catch the air only to tumble backward, heavy with intent. As if in a collective
dream, they weave their bodies into webs of delicate tension that dissolve with a breath.
Behind closed doors they dance with confrontation and surrender, encounter and departure,
memory and longing, all impelled by their shared undercurrent of desire. A couple’s tumultuous
love affair, a writer’s whiskey-clouded torment, a woman’s anxious isolation jolted by the
telephone’s ring—each is fleeing from, or perhaps toward, something. Drawn together by little
more than circumstance, they are searching, searching with no end in sight: beacons passing in
the night.