REVIEW: Mamie Green/VOLTA Dance Company’s “Loneliness Triptych” at the New Hollywood Theater in Los Angeles, October 24 – November 2, 2025

During COVID, so many friends confessed that they were dancing, at home, alone. It was their exercise, but it was also a way to get rid of the anxiety of being alive during a pandemic. I did it too. There was a way that unmitigated, unjudged movement could express what language couldn’t approach. Some posted their dances on socials, and suddenly it didn’t matter whether or not you were whatever a real dancer is supposed to be.

I also remember videos made during COVID, with swelling music that flashed what it would be like after the pandemic suddenly ended. A lot of embracing of loved ones, without sheets of protective plastic. A lot of close celebratory dancing as well. And there were more videos of picnics, people of all ages being together – a general idea of We would not have to be alone anymore.

But there was never any official whistle-blow, declaring “OK folks, it’s clear, we can now do swing dance with grandma again.” People are still getting COVID, there continue to be booster vaccines and now there is a super flu. Many of us are left with something that we least expected once it was OK to gather again: a deeper sense of isolation, of loneliness. And the fear of virus contagion doesn’t seem to be a contributing factor.

This complexity has its uncanny reflection in Loneliness Triptych, choreographed and directed by Mamie Green, even though the isolation of COVID is never directly addressed. We’re shown people dancing, moving, touching, lifting, and catching one another – a reality we could only dream of during COVID. But what’s communicated is a profound isolation and aloneness.

In a black box theater, with minimal and “mundane” props (as Mamie has explained to me), three vignettes are performed, two accompanied by narrative-like poems. The first, “Doppelgänger,” utilizes a powerful text co-authored by Sammy Loren and Stephanie Wambugu, which blends poetic elegy with the tone of 1950s hard-boiled gumshoe narration. We hear of a woman who finds in film not only escape but recognition as well. “Movies can know us, yes. They can see us. When we watch them, they watch us back,” she confesses to us. And we see two dancers “embody her inner landscape” (again quoting Mamie). Often twinning each other, they physicalize the narrator’s emotions and show us her release into her world. Mamie has managed to depict how being alone with cinema can unleash another life, one tangible enough to ripple out long after the film has ended:

Sitting alone in an ocean of empty seats, I ate popcorn and candy, sucked salt and sugar crystals from my fingers. And for a few hours it was just me and the pictures: a cowboy crossing a wild expanse or a mafioso polishing his gun. Or it was Humphrey Bogart, so beautiful, puffing on a cigarette. I ate until I felt sick, got refills and saw another movie. Bodies stabbed and shot, or choked and smacked, women tearing out their hair or stripping the peeling wallpaper from their parlors. Horrors of the body, sex, and mind. I don’t mean to be melodramatic, but like everything in life, movies end. And I always needed to go home.

I was already overweight after giving birth to my son, but I then entered the designation of morbidly obese. I had severe postpartum depression without knowing it. Once he was asleep, my escape was to sit and watch DVDs with all the food I needed. But this numbing always came to an end. I knew that I could be in the world of the doppelgängers who lived onscreen, gathering them to me offscreen in the language of my writing.

Watching Green’s VOLTA dance company (Bella Allen, Mandolin Burns, Anne Kim, Ryan Green, and Ryley Polak), I recognized the complexity and danger of escape via a doppelgänger, real or imagined. Green utilizes the kinetic language of movement – the doppelgänger dancers’ self-defense crouch of capoeira springing into the impossible grace of en pointe ballet – to express the unconscious.

In “The Cam-girl,” Lily Lady’s poem precariously comes alive around them as they recite words of... reflection? interrogation? boredom?

What do drugstore plastic nails say about human nature

Trading on derivatives

Of Lolita

What am I?

If not a man’s creation

An air mattress is a deterrent, an indictment, an invitation, a safety, between Lily and another. A lover? A customer? I laughed when Lily deadpanned, “I am not my best self / At the Apple Store in Williamsburg.”

Lily, though less physically active than other members of the VOLTA Company, fits perfectly. Dressed like a 17-year-old runaway from an American Apparel billboard – short shorts, knee socks, long pigtails – they are impossible not to watch, gracefully prowling, getting tossed, twirled. Being a fantasy people will pay for, being an archetypal social media ideal – a goal a huge percentage of people dream of – the very concept of an actual person feeling lonely or disconnected seems bizarre. I’ve fallen in that trap, believing if only I looked like (fill in the blank), all would be OK and I would never be lonely. Lily says, “Lately I won’t leave the house / For under 10K / Meaning I don’t leave much.” In the end, they are alone in a deflated mattress, which has become a cape or a cave.

The third act is “The Kid”: two men dance in an office chair, perilously balancing in a way that made me nervous. But they’re like children, not concerned about getting hurt as they whirl one another around in the chair, climbing over each other without much sexuality or desirability. This act eschewed any spoken narrative, leaving the audience to create our own. Detached from story, I could focus on their playful acrobatic-like dancing. At some point the music (an original score by Dylan Fukioka) became discordant, with their movements becoming more disconnected, more of a push-pull.

For the epilogue, some of the performers crawled into the audience, producing their phones and taking pictures of the dancers onstage, who were vaping and drinking from metal water bottles while Justin Timberlake sang “Cry Me A River.”

Objectified or ignored, everyone is being left alone, and Green allows us to feel that dissonance together. After the show, audience and cast hung outside, speaking about how affected they were, how witnessing isolation expressed in intricate and various forms had brought our own a little more into focus. We all jumped as a truck careened past us, setting off fireworks, “We Won!” the men hanging out of the truck shouted. We were invited to join in the celebration, WE were part of the Dodgers’ World Series victory. I called my dad, in his nineties, isolated by his frailty. He’d been a fan since they were at Ebbets Field in Flatbush. “We won!” his voice the strongest I’ve heard in a long time. Dem Bums had left Brooklyn 68 years ago, but he was there celebrating. I imagined him twirling on that Ebbets Field like the VOLTA dancers, when it’s hard to remember you’re watching more than one performer, no one is separate. It’s pure joy.