Houses of Zodiac

Is it a dramatic work, a dance recital, a cello concert, a film show? All of the above, and more, is the answer to that question.

Houses of Zodiac mixes various art forms to explore the intersection of mind, body, and nature. The ground-breaking, experimental production “brings word, movement, music, and image together to illuminate from within the verses of four poets: Pablo Neruda, Brenda Shaughnessy, Natasha Trethewey, and Anais Nin,” the creators explain in a helpful program note.

Former Kronos Quartet member Jeffrey Zeigler performs the music of Paola Prestini, while two dancers (Georgina Pazoquin and Dai Matsuoka) depict sinuously and magically the journey of two characters–-“strangers and soulmates at once”–-who explore the themes of communion and freedom.

Film images, projected on a curved back-screen, illuminate a segment called “Eight Takes” and create a unique cosmos, the key to which is contained in Shaughnessy’s poetic statement: “It could have gone so many ways/This is just one of the ways it went/Tell me another.”

Three more segments follow. “Oceano” focuses on images of the Arctic and the Antarctic, with Prestini reciting Neruda’s pithy verses.”Ophelia” looks at the world of New Orleans’ historic Storyville red-light district, with a dancer portraying the struggles of a young prostitute hoping to make a new life for herself. “Houses of Zodiac,” the final and longest segment, was inspired by Nin’s prose poem, “House of Incest.” A fantastical, complex, dream-like work, it takes place in the darkness of a labyrinth and dealt with “the rhythm of earth’s circles...dancing toward daylight.”

Houses of Zodiac, like much of avant-garde theater, can be puzzling and strange, but it left me feeling good about the evening, moved by it in a new and profound way.