This Is a Damage Manual | Dance review

It’s set in a world of black and white. A constant stream of projections hits the black brick wall upstage: Duchampian spirals and repeating patterns like checkerboard, tartan and houndstooth, black cats hiding in the tessellations. Sketched interiors: a ballet studio, a kitchen, a bedroom, an opulent ballroom. Giant text, often echoing the soundtrack, which samples authoritative, white male voices delivering self-help mantras, pseudoscience and personal advancement techniques. Lyrical silhouettes of snowfall, explosions and fumes, as if air were two-dimensional and open to interpretation, like a Rorschach blot. That menacing, three-bladed fan that warns of radiation or nuclear fallout. Other signage. Tic-tac-toe.

The four women who dance it are ready for us when we walk in, standing onstage in a line, facing the audience. Four lights on the floor behind them shine brighter as the official curtain time nears. We can’t see their faces but they can see ours. The light picks up the fine hairs on the dancers’ bare arms. Music like they use in the movies to accelerate anticipation plays. It sounds like vibraphone, accordion and pizzicato, broken now and then by a bow sawing back and forth across a cello’s strings. The piece begins.

There’s a lot of Hitler in it, for a piece that doesn’t otherwise have anything at all to do with Hitler. Hitler’s mostly played for laughs. Three dancers gear up in all-white snowsuits, face masks and trapper hats and barge onstage to surround, detain and taunt the fourth. Staying onstage, they morph into a hazmat team, scrubbing the floor and walls with the radiation symbol looming large in the background. In the kitchen scene, the lone dancer wears the negative of a ’50s-style party dress: The dress is bright white, with a black belt and black petticoat underneath. Signals of her mood change rapidly as cheery period music plays; now coy, now angry, now frantic, now easy, she turns the knobs on invisible appliances and grabs her left breast with her right hand, plunged just before with gusto into a bright white oven mitt.

The oven mitt echoes the fifth main character in This Is a Damage Manual, new from BONEdanse (through February 12 at Theater Wit): a skull puppet made from an athletic sock named Earl Nightingale, after the famous American motivational speaker and Pearl Harbor survivor. Near as I can tell, there’s no connection between the Nightingale and Hitler references even though, in one scene, Hitler (director-choreographer Atalee Judy) and the sock skull—wearing a mini Hitler mustache—share a few laughs and kiss each other tenderly before tucking into bed to fall asleep.

You may be familiar with a 2001 sculpture by Maurizio Cattelan titled HIM. This is not like that, even though the text above that scene reads, “Some cringe at the thought that they too could house a monster.”

This Is a Damage Manual announces in its commendably comprehensive program notes that “Everyone is bracing for an emotional meltdown.” If you feel the same, you may indeed find dissentient comfort in the uncharted bailiwicks of its black-and-white world. Its unresolved dissonances and untethered emotions will harmonize with chords of overload and confusion about what’s happening here, in our one, painfully colorful world.

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BONEdanse’s This Is a Damage Manual continues through February 12 at Theater Wit (1229 W Belmont Ave, 773-975-8150).