Introduction: Borders, Performance, and the Global Urban Condition

Every performance by Lux Boreal has a distinctive feel. Those pieces that might be regarded as most representative of the company’s output all reflect a signature performance mode — call it ‘dance theatre realism’ — that consistently produces the same affective response: a sort of social vertigo; a not–unpleasant feeling of placelessness. Based in Tijuana, Lux is the most celebrated contemporary dance company in northern Mexico. While its body of work is eclectic and reflects the concerns and techniques of a gamut of choreographers, the performance practices most closely associated with Lux fuse expressive dance with behavioral gesture. Often, extended sequences are built out of quotidian, pedestrian movement: in Falling Into Place, choreographed by Allyson Green, the performers seem to be moving through a social landscape, parts of which resemble a kind of party in continual, lethargic motion (see Figure 0.1). Movement in Falling Into Place is alternately languid and frenetic — perhaps an embodied abstraction of the convection currents of friendship and affection — memorably punctuated by virtuosic leaps: a dancer drifting through a crowd suddenly locks eyes with another dancer and propels herself horizontally into the other’s arms, rapidly accelerating from a stand-still to horizontal motion and then to a dead stop again, pausing for a moment in this cruciform embrace, then relaxing, parting, and drifting away, only to repeat the sequence.