Review: Reveling in a Wry Storybook, Full of Characters

Tess Dworman is rarely just Tess Dworman. This choreographer and dancer is a shape-shifter with a biting wit. She inhabits other people as if she were flipping through sketches and bringing them to life. You grasp who they are through Dworman’s delivery, an endearing mix of sharp and guileless.

In the opening of her oddly engrossing dance-theater work “Everything Must Go,” her voice — sounding like Linus of “Peanuts” fame — is heard in the distance before she arrives onstage at the Chocolate Factory Theater. She suggests that we try a thought experiment by imagining that “everything the light touches is yours,” as she puts it. “Everyone the light touches is yours. Everything beyond these walls belongs to you. And everyone beyond these walls is on your staff.”

It’s calming, even though Dworman’s universe is a wry place. The performer is not just at the mercy of the audience; the performer belongs to the audience. But her intention is purposely murky (even absurd) as she hopes that we will “revel in the honoring of you in my performance, which is yours.”

In “Everything Must Go” — at least in parts of it — the role of an artist is selfless, altruistic. But is it really? Dworman can spin anything. In meditation-teacher mode, and in other transformations, she has more than her language down. It’s her appeasing tone that gives her personas believability.

The satirical “Everything Must Go,” first presented last year at Pageant, a space in Brooklyn, uses experimental performance as a way to dig under the surface of what makes something good or desirable. When Dworman does arrive onstage, she is covered in a knitted striped blanket and crawling on all fours. If, during her voice over, she was a meditation guide, now she is an ottoman. Because she is able to glide with such acute body control, she says, “This is a person who knows how to behave like an object.”

Dworman, as the ottoman, parks herself sideways along the front row, where an audience member stretches out a leg on her blanketed back before she transforms again. The shifts are sudden in “Everything Must Go,” in which Dworman and two other performers, Ned Riseley and Sonya Gadet Molansky, take turns diving into character explorations. In them, improvisation is intertwined with carefully planned choreography.