By Debra Cash

In Myokine, the ensemble itself is under interrogation: can these dancers connect enough to rescue each other? Can they form bonds of solidarity?

Myokine by Anne Plamondon Productions, presented by Global Arts Live at the Institute for Contemporary Art, Boston December 13-14

She seems under bombardment.

The woman at the far edge of the darkened stage space is crouching, grimacing, teetering, looking up; the shaft of light running along the floor could be a trench, a place of demarcation and retreat, but the tension is reinforced as others enter, crawling, falling, lying exhausted or dead. There’s a mechanical drone as a steady background: could it be an airplane? It’s unclear where we are, but the uneasy opening moments of Anne Plamondon’s Myokine convey that something dangerous must have happened before this, and something dangerous will probably continue long after this scene comes to its conclusion.

Plamondon’s Quebec-based company — five women and two men — was new to Boston when Global Arts Live presented it this month, but her work was seen during the years she co-directed Rubberband with Victor Quijada. Both companies speak the European lilt of contemporary dancing with fluid contemporary gesture and balletic rigor (all those long, reaching arabesques!) spiked with a decontextualized acrobatic ease by way of international b-boying. It’s a style that sometimes features star performers, but where the lithe and handsome artists are more important as ensemble members than as distinct characters. In Myokine, the ensemble itself is under interrogation: can these dancers connect enough to rescue each other? Can they form bonds of solidarity?

The program note mentions “the regenerative molecules of hope released by muscles in motion” – apparently such actions affect neuroplasticity, memory, sleep, and mood. But Plamondon isn’t looking through a microscope. The ICA stage, evocatively carved into different territories and dimensions by Eric Chad, is busy with dancers moving with alternating underwater luxuriance and stuttering pulses. Referential motions occasionally anchor the flow: a series of archery poses, the dancers pulling back their elbows as if to launch invisible arrows; people dragging each other as if off a battlefield.

Stepping up to a hanging microphone, the performers speak in English and French to express platitudes like “I just couldn’t bear to continue” and “somehow, we kept going.” Later, a dancer will thrust the microphone back into their faces like a journalist trying to nab a juicy quote at the scene of a disaster, and someone shares a snippet that sounds like Emily Dickinson’s hope is the thing with feathers. These cheap revelations disclose nothing of value, and detract from the more precise language of Plamondon’s stage pictures and traveling shadows.

Still, the company’s shared impulse, the connection among their breaths, was impressive. I found myself thinking that when one dancer touched another, it read as an instruction as much as a support. Repetition and ensemble work was evidence, somehow, that collective persistence could matter even in dark times. And when the piece concluded, the dancers lined up, side to side, and sent their breaths towards the audience in a deep exhale. Their blown kiss felt like courage.

Debra Cash is a Founding Contributing Writer to the Arts Fuse and a member of its Board.