LABIR INTO,a play on the Italian word for labyrinth, celebrated its New York premiere in 2016. The New York Times called Labir Into a work that “speaks to how we navigate our interior dead ends and false turns on the unclear path to self-awareness.” While the stage is turned into a physical labyrinth, the dancers appear to rise and fall, forming associations familiar to us through paintings like Tintoretto’s The Stealing of the Body of St. Mark (1562-1566) or Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, (1818-1819). Rago’s Labir Into achieves heroic form as dancers scurry diagonally across stage, then, in a physical about-face, retract their advances as if a ground-swell were overtaking them. Rago is a master of the nearly-hidden pause — a stop/start device that oddly accelerates the chase scene. This formal strategy is used not to hold things back or contain movement, but to pit the audience on an axis point it hardly expects.
