The show’s opening is exemplary of this: a single dancer on a stark stage, one light and silence. A sudden burst of Dizzy Gillespie’s “A Night in Tunisia” jolts the stage into the frenzied “Another Night” (Kyle Abraham, 2012), ever uplifting as dancers in rich colors swing to the never-quite-resolving syncopation of the jazz. The execution of Abraham’s fresh and dynamic choreography reminds the audience at the very beginning that Alvin Ailey is not just another dance company.

There is an openness to Alvin Ailey dancing, an all-out expansion of the body which hearkens to the optimizing American world that initially gave birth to the company. Endlessly flexible joints fluidly switch, filling the box of space around each dancer. Truly, Ailey dancers work in three dimensions, including upwards. They fill the very top corners of that figurative box of space surrounding them with each leap and grasping extension, totally capitalizing upon their bodies and the full stage. At the same time, however, dancers still take the time to pause or move slowly and give weight to their motion. As “In/Side,” a piece from Battle himself, begins, the sole dancer lifts his leg magnificently slowly above his horizontal form, allowing a singular light to shine graciously upon it before it is swept around in more sharp and heated movements.

That dance, which followed the extremely emotional two-person “Strange Humors” (Battle, 1998), was a remarkable dance soliloquy that brought an exhilarating blast of postmodern gold to the stage. Dancer Samuel Lee Roberts’ performance was breathtaking and thrashing yet graceful. He lifted, leaped, rolled, threw himself to the ground and even stood with a remarkably personal conviction. Set to Nina Simone’s “Wild is the Wind,” the dance brought a narrative intensity that somehow gathered its power from the suavity of the soundtrack.

“In/Side” was also one of many pieces hugely impacted by the use of simple lighting. The unaffected colored light gave the empty stage depth, texture and atmosphere, while highlighting the striking geometry of the choreography. In “Petite Mort” in particular, the lighting added a whole new dimension to the performance: Colored lights shone in such a way that dancers’ shadows came alive in brilliant purple and seemed to dance on their own.

It is details like this that prove that Alvin Ailey’s difference from other dance performance can only be understood from seeing them perform in the theater. Unlike in traditional European ballet, the dancers’ flesh is exposed. The immense movement, the twisting and balance of some of the choreography makes the audience see the individual dancer and not just the execution. One notices their skin and their shape and can understand that what they are seeing is the flesh on a dancer’s bones. Moreover, there is a joy in the dance. Ailey performs pieces with a vibrancy that silently shouts the exuberance of moving the body, of filling the space around oneself by moving so fast that it is as if one is in two places at once.

And it is these things — the individualism, the optimization, the color, the character, the willingness to do something new — that make the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater truly the quintessence of American dance.

Contact AJ Kantor at akantor@dailycal.org.

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Conspicuously overdressed in “theater” uniform (black suits, bowler hats and umbrellas — red, white and black) dancers careered around the museum’s atrium before five of them recited short soliloquies beginning with “I remember” (one was in French: “Je me souviens”). Halprin’s frequent collaborator Morton Subotnick orchestrated the overture like a conductor — or rather a puppeteer — cutting off some performers and coaxing crescendos from others.

However, this prelude was upstaged completely by the most prosaic of rituals — the act of dressing and undressing. Dancers slowly began to ceremoniously peel off clothing until they were completely naked. A frequenter of Pilates classes will recall that the slowest exercises are the toughest tests of endurance. But unlike athletes, dancers are forbidden from letting fatigue show on their faces. Though flexes were held unbearably long, dancers’ gazes were directed at the audience, and they were unnervingly focused. The re-dressing was just as glacial in its pace, which varied from person to person. Once clothed, dancers purposefully traipsed around the stage. To reflect the new mood, Petula Clark’s jaunty “Downtown” played.

It’s about this time that you started to become curious about the extent of Halprin’s hand in the management of details: Did she personally OK the blue Diesel briefs at rehearsal? Did no one foresee the prolonged noisiness of taking off Velcro shoes in slow motion?

Nudity in post-modern dance has become commonplace to the point of banality, but to criticize Halprin on the basis of banality is like a millennial thinking Marilyn Monroe’s look is tired because pop stars like Gwen Stefani and Christina Aguilera have been channeling the same one. The chronology is all wrong. Originals have dulled into cliches over time: Monroe’s pinup wasn’t a cliche when she first arrived, just as nudity in contemporary dance was far from ordinary in 1967, when Halprin showcased “Parades and Changes” in New York. In fact, it was so out of the ordinary that it warranted Halprin’s arrest for indecent exposure.

But at Friday’s performance nudity, was met with neither puerility nor mutinous outrage. One segment, the most collaborative one, even prompted audience encouragement and spontaneous clapping. In it, the naked dancers triumphantly ripped apart rolls of brown butcher paper, tossing shreds into the air. The tearing of large sheets of paper is one of those sounds you don’t realize you love until you are forced to concentrate on nothing else for several minutes. Distinguishing between person and paper soon became hopeless, but the scene cast beautifully rendered amber shadows over the museum’s concrete walls. Standing in a compact herd, the dancers gathered these shorn remnants close to their bodies, like a dozen or so Adams and Eves. In keeping with the warm tones, The Beach Boys’ “The Warmth of the Sun” played.

Near the show’s end, Halprin had dancers drop one by one on a large wooden block. Some would collapse upon contact while others would melt onto it through a backbend. In this exercise, the rule that governed all of the evening’s performances emerged: The surprise of “Parades and Changes” came not from watching what was going to happen but rather how it did.

Contact Neha Kulsh at nkulsh@dailycal.org.

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The first performance, Edwaard Liang’s 2008 ballet “Age of Innocence,” is the most recent and possibly the most accessible. As mentioned earlier, it is a dance based on the aristocratic world of the Regency era. The men bowed to the women; the women curtsied to the men. As the dancers weaved in and out of this polished web, the score — comprised of clips by Philip Glass and Thomas Newman — heightened the intensity with an urgent undercurrent of striking violins. Slowly but surely, this became not a dance about polite postures, but a high stakes battle between the rigid choreography of public duty and the loose, sensuous grace of personal rapture. In a particular pas de deux entitled “Obey Thee,” dancers Victoria Jaiani and Fabrice Calmels embodied this conflict with a series of leaps and bodily contortions so effortlessly natural they challenged the viewer’s very ideas of innocence and physical love.

Calmels and Jaiani return to the foreground for the second ballet — Christopher Wheeldon’s “After the Rain.” Split into two parts, the first began much like “Age of Innocence.” The lines, of three men and three women dressed in somber gray, are geometric, carefully constructed and harsh. The dancers appeared almost akin to automatons — going through the motions of technical precision with minimal sentiment. Set to the frenetic sound of Arvo Part’s “Tabula Rasa,” the moves suddenly changed direction. There were leaps going backwards and feet that seem to be floating on air. The stage went black before a brilliant orange screen emerged. Then, there’s Calmels shirtless and Jaiani in nothing but a muted pink leotard. They upped the ante from “Age of Innocence” and let their emotions dictate their fluid and breathtaking movements to the delicate yearning of Part’s near-ten-minute opus, “Spiegel im Spiegel.”

Kurt Jooss’ antiwar epic, “The Green Table,” rounded out the show. Here, the renowned versatility of the Joffrey Ballet truly shined. Created in 1932, Jooss’ ballet is less abstractly emotional than it is a painfully vivid theatrical expression of the hypocrisy, love, loss and futility of war. As the skeletal Death, dancer Dylan Gutierrez manipulated not only the space before him, but the rest of the cast and audience alike with his menacing stare and purposeful execution. The wicked faces of masks worn by the Gentlemen in Black, representing the politicians and bureaucrats of war, haunted the crowd as the dancers gesticulated madly. The look of sheer sadness on the faces of April Daly and Anastacia Holden as the Old Mother and Young Girl captivated with utter terror amid the plaintive plucking of the two live pianos

In 1967, the Joffrey Ballet became the first American company to perform “The Green Table.” After 46 years, the ballet is still as powerful as ever. Using pistols with blanks, the show went out with a literal bang — capping a collection of emotionally vibrant and physically potent pieces both old and new.

Contact Jessica at jpena@dailycal.org

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The first act was a showy display of macho authority. Prince Siegfried (danced by Danila Korsuntsev) and the jester (Vasily Tkachenko) vied for attention by way of spectacular jumps and flashy footwork, bursting with muscular panache. Their leaps at times seemingly implausible; the two men appeared to be made of springs. And in what was perhaps the most thrilling sequence, the jester performed an astounding pirouette “a la seconde,” spinning at length with his nonpivot leg stretched perfectly orthogonal to his body and rotating at breathtaking pace. This sort of confidence came to define the piece, as the dancers did not miss a single opportunity to exhilarate the audience in emphatic fashion.

What sets the Mariinsky dancers apart, however, is not the just their confidence but their ability to be limitlessly expressive while remaining utterly deliberate and precise. No one did this better than Ekaterina Kondaurova in her mesmerizing portrayal of the Swan Queen Odette. Her arms alone were a sight to behold, painting entire pictures in midair but never veering from their prescribed motions. Her overall bearing was light and spontaneous yet at the same time grounded with intent. All the while her fellow swans (including Keenan Kampa, the first American to be featured in the Mariinsky Ballet) were beautifully fluid and elegant in framing the second act’s lakeside scene.

The magic of the Mariinsky Ballet also stems from its embodiment of Russian artistic tradition. After all, the 1895 performance upon which most current renditions of “Swan Lake” are based took place at the Mariinsky Theater in St. Petersburg. Moreover, the Mariinsky Ballet performs a distinctly Russian version of the piece that includes a jester and culminates in a happier ending. Somehow, the company conveyed total ownership of the story, almost as if to show American audiences how it’s truly done. It was as if the essence of the ballet was built into the dancers, and everything flowed naturally from there.

Any perceptible flaws in this production of “Swan Lake” were minor if not negligible. The third act witnessed a group of dancers with bells attached to their costumes and a few ballerinas carrying tambourines. The effect was altogether too jingly yet did little to distract from the quality of the dancing. Throughout the performance, meanwhile, there was an exorbitant amount of squeaking coming from ballerinas’ shoes, though this was likely due to the condition of the Zellerbach floor rather than any mishap on the part of the dancers. Incredibly, these were the only parts even marginally problematic in the entire ballet.

More than anything else, it was the intimacy of the production that made the Mariinsky version of “Swan Lake” so spectacular. Every touch, gesture or extension was full of feeling, lending drama to the story’s more intense moments. The black swan pas de deux was particularly memorable, with its stylish lifts and close interactions carried out in vibrant and romantic fashion. The Mariinsky dancers’ passionate portrayal of such moments is what rendered their interpretation of “Swan Lake” truly world class.

Contact Eytan at eschindelhaim@dailycal.org

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The Berkeley Dance Project’s latest show, “Beneath the Flesh,” broke the silence and used the body as a voice in a powerful forum for raw emotion, philosophically-inspired choreography and masterful set designs. “Beneath the Flesh” divided itself  into three works, performed by an almost entirely female cast, that spoke of the tensions of being and becoming a woman in modern society.

Even before entering the theater, the audience got a taste of truly bizarre juxtapositions of body and space they were about to see. Stepping into the corridor that led to my seat, I stood frozen when I noticed someone huddled in the corner, sobbing quietly. I continued walking as the mysterious woman began following me through the corridor, desperately clinging onto the wall and handrail support. Thoroughly bewildered, I eventually made it to my seat, where my fellow audience members were casually chatting away, making the entire ordeal even more surreal. This was but a taste of the performance’s forceful collisions of the body with the dark moments that lie on the fringes of human emotion.

The pieces themselves delivered a more mainstream brand of feminism that focused on the internal and external forces that shape girls throughout the stages of womanhood.  In the work “Searching for the Moon in the Dark Night Sky,” choreographed by Amara Tabor-Smith, it was not so much the content as it was the choice of media that challenged existing narrative forms of femininity.  The dancers forcefully used writhing and seizing movements of the body to communicate the gravity of the emotional violence that women experience in society. Tabor-Smith coordinated the dancers with a multimedia display that bordered on tense realism and heavy-handed political soap boxing.
The dance’s political narrative was a counter argument against modern media’s objectification of the female body. That isn’t to say that the dancers didn’t emphasize their respective physical sensualities, but the performers brought forward the social and emotional burdens that come along with the feminine form.

UC Berkeley dance program director Lisa Wymore’s  “The dead are born from a dream of the living” exhibited her disciplined approach to the art, as well as her expert stagecraft, that made for the show’s stand-out piece.  Sparse, echoing stomps and long tonal notes sung by the dancers came together in a minimalist symphony that set the airy landscape for their performance.

Wymore told a story of our journey through life and death on a stage divided into four realms of work, home, harvest and nature. The dancers acted not as characters but as sentiments corresponding to a stage of life; making for a narrative that couched existentialism in a set akin to Mondrian’s structured abstractions. With a calm, controlled tempo, movements that were spacey yet exact, and an engaging scenescape, the work was simply minimalist dance at its finest.

Whether in discussions of life and death or the state of femininity, “Beneath the Flesh” stopped at nothing to uncover the festering reality of identity politics. With personal moments verging on outright voyeurism, the show brought us into the neurotic tensions that form the self. The pieces, though at times disjointed, gave an honest portrayal of the fractured identities that comprise our modern age.

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The intended purpose of this “¡Ole!” changed, however, as the night progressed, the performers utilizing the term to various ends.

There was “¡Ole!” when the mandolin player took an impromptu fifteen minute solo. “¡Ole!” when a confused dancer or two exited stage left rather than stage right. And the occasional, knowing “¡Ole!” when it became clear that there  had been a grandiose flub in the choreography. Thus “¡Ole!” became “Oops!”

In a perfect world, these mishaps would add up to a sort of street-show colorfulness, a display of ensemble straight out of “Dirty Dancing: Havana Nights.” Instead, the performance stumbled about stiffly, proving to be an off-night for three momentarily clumsy giants of the flamenco world.

Carolina Lugo and Carole Acuna are a dynamic mother/daughter duo. Lugo has decades of professional Spanish dance behind her, a gift which she has quite obviously passed on to her daughter, Acuna, who moves with a fluidity and attitude that at times overpowers her mother. When the show opened to the duo moving slowly upstage, castanets in hand, all elongated torso and wrist flourish, the audience could nearly feel the “¡Ole!” bubbling up.

And then the glitches began and the true meaning of the exclamation became clear.

For one, the dancers more than occasionally forgot and forwent the steps before them in the routine, often times glancing feverishly at others to regain their footing. Even Lugo appeared lost in the night’s choreography, fragmenting movements that, under other circumstances, should have been lusciously accentuated. The performance clearly lacked the sensuality and assuredness that the dancer has so often been praised for; the aging powerhouse’s delivery was bewildered, even.

Unfortunately for the rest of the ensemble, the best bits of choreography were also the fastest, and were left primarily to the show’s three leads. And while the slower bits limped along in their wake, this seemed a necessary dulling down, purposefully crafted to accommodate the abilities (or inabilities) of the ensemble.

Lest we forget the third giant of the evening, guest star Antonio Arrebola, fresh out of Spain. His ease onstage, creative arc and wry and lively approach to traditional flamenco effectively made him the performer of the night, easily overshadowing the rest of the cast. The duet in which he danced with and around the company’s songstress — a riveting singer with a vast, emotionally charged vibrato pallet — was the highlight of the evening.

It should also be noted that the ballet aspect of this ballet flamenco was nearly absent, with the exception of an arabesque or two in the beginning and a few minutes of solo dancing by Acuna at the end — arguably her most alluring performance of the night.

There is always the possibility that the night’s performance was an uncharacteristically rough one, for it seems that the propensity for quality flamenco was present in the bunch. Let us hope that in future performances, the award-winning company will reclaim “¡Ole!” for its proper use.

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The most spectacular moment of the night arrived early on, when the audience and dancers were just warming up to “Home,” Rennie Harris’s piece inspired by those living with HIV. A tightly packed body of dancers pulsated at center stage to a hybrid hip-hop trance track. One man broke off from the crowd in a more frenzied move. What unraveled was a flawless re-staging of the slow motion effect fixture of music video club scenes. It was nuances like these which jogged our memories of the vernacular spaces Battle tapped into.

Throughout “Home,” dancers splintered off into solos while pockets of synchronized moves opened up elsewhere on stage. As the dancers echoed specific moves off of each other, there was a focus on lines of the human frame. They returned to a limp Jesus-on-the-cross style move time and again. At other points, they violently thrashed arms and limbs. Some of these moves are homages to the same pose from Ailey’s classic “Revelations,” where men and woman have heads bowed, arms raised like wings.

The whole scene is ecstatic but haunting. With the allegorical theme of HIV-affected individuals in mind, the deep breaths that opened and closed it were more dire, the idea of a banished and welcoming into a circle more resonant.

Of the three works, Ohad Naharin’s “Minus 16” relied the most on the punch of spectacle. It’s the kind of piece that people talk about during intermission, but doesn’t linger as strongly in the mind days after. This is partly because of a throw-shit-at-the-wall-and-see-what-sticks attitude. Granted, this is Alvin Ailey Dance Theater, so the shit don’t stink.

Ailey’s “Revelations” would have been even more charged if it was backed by a live chorus, as in its classic iteration back in 1958. The piece has aged gracefully, and it possessed a sheen of sincerity not as sharp in the other two pieces. The show’s music did feel a little too distant, though, like it was filtering in from some other stage. Maybe this is because much of the music was gospel, a form that isn’t done justice on recorded tracks, and trance, which isn’t suited for a seated theater.

“Minus 16” began with a sensual voice warning about the “panic behind laughter.” The grand closing involved the plucking of audience members onstage for an interactive dance piece that separated the wheat from Berkeley chaff. Standouts included a not-afraid-to-mambo audience member in red and an older woman who stood on an empty stage to a round of applause and then laughter from the full theater.

The interaction was an organic echo of the lone dancer who opened the show. This time, the audience was laughing at one of its own. There did seem to be some panic behind the laughter after the unease that came with being stared down by dancers striding into the audience. The tension was broken when an audience member in a snazzy blue dress started throwing it down with her professional partner and the crowd could heave a collective sigh of relief. The scene was a declaration that even with a new director, the Alvin Ailey company will always have the audacity to challenge the spectator by at once alienating and welcoming her.

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Despite this, it quickly became evident that the dancers only looked the part and had no engaging part to play. Though the overall spectacle was aesthetically pleasing, a combination of lifeless choreography and listless execution stamped on whatever hopes one might have had for an enthralling experience. The introductions to main characters like Tybalt, Benvolio and Mercutio bore little indication of skillful dancing or emotional investment. Apart from a handful of compelling leaps, these were cursory, safe segments performed with minimal energy — a deplorable outcome for the principal dancers and soloists of a world-class ballet company.

Even Romeo and Juliet’s first interactions fell remarkably flat. It is a wonder that such poignant, romantic scenes can be danced in such lackluster fashion. Juliet (danced by Sarah Van Patten) appeared disengaged, and not in a playing-hard-to-get sort of way. Her movements were exceedingly mechanical, her physicality restrained, and though her form was visibly polished, she showed little more passion than a middle-aged nun. Meanwhile, Romeo (danced by Pierre-Francois Villanoba) suffered from the opposite conundrum. Always a little too self-important and eager, his dancing appeared busy and off-balance rather than fluid and free flowing.

Elsewhere, it was a sign of tiresome choreography that even the furious fight scenes between the Montagues and Capulets were uninspiring. Instead of taking a rapid, pulsating pace, Mercutio and Tybalt’s clash was merely a lethargic brandishing of swords. One sat beseeching them for more, seeking an ominous leap or a whirlwind of twirls — there are so many possibilities for a ballet fight scene — but received nothing more than harmless, below-par fencing. Moreover, Mercutio trivialized a grave moment by taking an age to die: In a piece of unintentionally hilarious choreography, he staggered across the stage melodramatically for several minutes before finally giving up his moment in the spotlight.

Throughout, the ballet was severely lacking in urgency and drama. A story of such woe must be danced with instinct, impulse and intent. It must be heartwrenching and thrilling, steeped in fiery love and fierce tragedy. But this production captured none of the gravitas that lends power and purpose to a ballet. It seemed as though the choreography was preoccupied only with delivering the story, rather than delivering a gripping display of dancing. Perhaps this production would have done better to abandon some of the less crucial parts of the story so as to allow for more fervent dancing in its more intense moments. Perhaps then the dancers would be more animated and exciting to watch.

Instead, the San Francisco Ballet’s “Romeo and Juliet” was more soporific than the sleeping potion Juliet drinks near the end of the performance. There was more aimless sauntering and exaggerated death than dancing in the piece. When Romeo and Juliet finally killed themselves at the conclusion, it was no great tragedy, both because of the tedious way the scene was performed and relief that the show was finally over.

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That self-imposed alienation is certainly a heady issue to tackle, but through four riveting CalSLAM spoken word poetry performances that punctuated Friday’s show in Zellerbach Hall, the complexities of this issue unfolded. Each performance spotlighted two or three poets accompanied by a solo interpretative dancer, in performances that were darkly thought-provoking in their rhythm, content, and the way each dancer described the words with their bodies.

As evidenced by the CalSLAM and solo dance performances, the show confirmed not only the diverse talents of the Berkeley student body, but also its student groups’  impressively collaborative choreography, musical sets and skits.

New to this year’s show was an engaging community art exhibit that displayed not only pieces by current practice of art majors, but also a compilation of different projects done by local elementary and middle school students. These students contributed over two hundred pieces of art, ranging from crayon drawings to cut-out dolls, all relaying their individual takes on the world.

Particularly endearing were the self-portraits provided by the students of Longfellow Middle School. From a distance, they merely look like simple line drawings of faces, but to see one more closely would reveal that the lines are actually made up of words: lyrics, places, favorite things, etc.

The night’s performances certainly contained a lot of serious take-away messages, but the great thing about Perspectives was that it had a perfect balance of  the serious and the purely fun. Student improv groups, Jericho! and BareStage Unscripted, were as hilarious as always in their collaborative skit, “A Complete and Accurate History of Berkeley,” which was neither complete nor accurate but very funny. With its carelessly lackadaisical take on everything from the Free Speech Movement to Occupy.

One of the night’s highlights was the “Phantom of the Opera” dance put together by Chinese dance group, Fei Tian, and Azaad, a co-ed Bollywood dance group. In a performance chock-full of infectious energy, the two dance groups showed the audience exactly what cross-cultural collaboration looks like, communicating so much more through leaps and body rolls than promotional rhetoric and diversity catchphrases.

It all ended in a sweeping grand finale, with a perfectly fitting song choice: “You Can’t Stop the Beat” from the musical “Hairspray,” giving all the different a capella and dance groups a chance to star in one last encore performance that communicated the collaborative spirit of the entire cast.

Hopefully the end of this year’s Perspectives show will not bring the end of this collaborative spirit between the different performance groups that made up the cast. By joining them together in this show, the ASUC gave these distinct groups a chance to work together and learn from each other, a rare but crucial opportunity for a lively but often fractured community like ours.

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The highlight of “Story/Time” is not necessarily the dancing itself. The dancers in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company are stellar specimens of human motion, executing the most difficult steps with ease, and, perhaps most impressively, trust. They possess incredible stamina, implementing impeccable technique over the long interludes of Jones’s tremendous choreography, which spans both time and discipline.

Jones’s narration of the stories gives the production power, his voice booming throughout, hitting intimations with such power as to create an emotional tension otherwise impossible in the production of numerous mismatched stories.

While there are recurring aspects to the narratives, for the most part the stories are unrelated and vary hugely in content. Jones moves from describing his final hours with his mother Estelle, to reliving a dance practice, to reciting a sound bite of history about the Industrial Revolution.

They unfurl in completely random order, often skipping directly from touching moments to deadpan recitations. His pacing changes with each one-minute story, creating varied emotional effects.

Jones’s delivery of the narrative is the lone aspect of “Story/Time” not left to chance. The connection between narrative, dance and music may be fiercely clear in one story and completely ambiguous in the next. Which is not to say that there are no messages to be deciphered in moments of ambiguity. Miraculously, Jones leverages emotional depth without any real linearity of story, subject or message within the piece’s frenetic landscape. Attempting to understand the root of these moments of poignancy is daunting, however, especially when repeated 70 times over.

There are occasional moments where “Story/Time” leaps off of the page and not in a good way. Extended nudity — both male and female — is one such example. The two minute stint was shocking and perhaps a bit too extended. Naked bodies are a distraction from anything else except fellow naked bodies, and the audience stuttered on it. At one point in the night, a deafening swirl of electronic sounds descended over Zellerbach, leaving the viewer to watch Jones’s mouth as he read on, despite being rendered mute by the noise. The intended shock factor is a little heavy-handed.

“Story/Time” wields serious emotional power in spite of itself, with ambiguity as its beating heart. Because, while there are undertones of theme throughout — of family, aging, race, ethics — nothing is ever made explicit, refusing the viewer an easy way out. It is in search of these bonds, as well as in the happy moments of unexpected, insecure and nuanced poignancy, that the true power of “Story/Time” is unveiled.

And sometimes the time on that digital clock absolutely flies.

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