Message in a Bottle, 02 May 2024

Message in a Bottle at New York City Center was a beautiful dance performance set to the music of Sting. Deliberately fictional, the story was universal and unconnected to current geopolitical conflicts. I found myself overcome by this haunting reminder that displacement, exile, fear, loss, separation, pain, and the strangeness of starting over have happened across cultures, across time and space, at every moment between biblical times and today. Pardon my pun, but the bittersweet sting of this story was my dismay about its pervasiveness. The diversity of the audience and the universality of the pain was comforting and off putting. Why do we all have to go through this? Why does intergenerational trauma tug on our heart strings?

Message in a Bottle followed three children from a happy family through the death of their parents and their imprisonment in a refugee camp. They were separated, and while all three were able to make it out alive to some sense of peace, they were separated from each other, living in separate worlds, seemingly with no contact. (I say seemingly because the story is told through dance, and this was my interpretation). One found friendship, one found love, and the third was reunited with his wife, who had been sold into sexual slavery in an earlier scene. The final scene was evocative of the beginning, but it was not a homecoming. It was a distant memory, buried in the sands of time. And also, its own beginning—the restarting of a cycle of human suffering with no end in sight.

Dance and choreography are the elements of theatre about which I know least, and in a way, that makes them more moving to me. They enchant me and enrapture me because I never studied them. There is no part of my brain deconstructing how an effect was created. I am able to be present in a way that recaptures the joy I felt in theatres as a child, before seeing a show generated analysis and explanations. This show crowded out the part of me that is analyzing a show as I go through it, the part of me that is actively putting together a puzzle. It’s exceptionally rare that I feel present in a theatre the way I felt present for Message in a Bottle. It never dragged, and there was a very real catharsis for me in how the music and the movement spoke for themselves with words as an afterthought. This increased the universal tug I was feeling as I allowed it to take me on a journey. I would be remiss if I did not mention the beauty, power, and undisputable artistry in Andrzej Goulding’s video design.

Interestingly, I don’t remember every plot point of the story, though there are some images that I doubt I will ever be able to push aside. Although the feeling of walking out of a show without a clear sense of the exact order of the plot was unfamiliar to me, I found myself with an overwhelming level of emotion and thematic connection that was more powerful than simply bearing witness to a story. I left with some perspective of how, in the grand scheme of the world, I am part of a broader suffering, but also part of a coexisting joy as we are starting to share these stories and use them to connect with one another. In a way, it was a relief that this was not my pain and my pain alone—that the whole audience left feeling something. We all know how it hurts. Performances like this are the start of finding ways to heal.

I did not attend this performance on a press pass.