Reflections on "Heart String" by Ciarra D'Onofrio
- Molly Rose-Williams
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
Three days after watching Heart String, a few images still swim in my mind:
Kriss Rulifson caressing a shatteringly bright spotlight with their bare arms, moving around the light’s rounded edge as their body begins to shudder. Small shakes at first, and then heaving undulations. Bass drum breaths punctuate the still air; Kristin’s face is smooth and clear, as if gazing upon the face of someone they love.
A migrating mass of light blue bodies, shuffling quietly from a sea of chairs to reassemble in a clump upstage left. Shoulders, lips, and hands settle in the unselfconscious way of people getting ready to do something they’ve done a thousand times. The first notes emanate from their throats like birds in the night. And then they’re singing.
Hannah Westbrook and Devon Chen whirling around one another against a white wall, suspended by lines that allow them to push against the vertical concrete as if it were a floor. Jumping and flying, pressing and curving in an ever-growing flurry of movement—towards and away from one another. Towards and away from the wall, never touching the ground.
In the program notes, director Ciarra D’Onofrio writes that Heart String was “born out of a journey with grief and death.” The intimacy of this journey is clear in the tones of reverence and profundity that permeate the work. Movement, poetry, and song weave together to compose a richly-tapestried, deeply-felt piece full of images of death, grief, and searching.
The work hangs together with a kind of fractured inevitability—each section is distinct, separated by clear transitions, but together they build towards a whole that speaks to me of an emotional journey through grief. I find myself tracking the “grief journey” at first, as if it’s a literal narrative being written in movement. In the first section I see the moment of death, and the agonizing surrender of someone left behind. In the sections that follow, I see listlessness, heartache, numbness, shock, disorientation, nostalgia, and sorrow. I have heard that grief is love unspent, and the full-bodied commitment of the performers to their movement and songs ring out with love.
The movement is mostly a hybrid of ground and aerial dance enabled by harnesses that attach the performer’s waist to ropes suspended from the ceiling. This enables a movement vocabulary that is both airy, but bounded. Performers are able to flip, swing, and turn in unexpected ways, but the ropes also tether each performer to a certain circumference in space, literally pulling them off their feet if they try to stray beyond the reach of the rope. The surrealness of the gravity-defying maneuvers and the inescapability of the rope combine to create a physical language that feels metaphorically appropriate for the states of grief the work explores—disorienting, ethereal, and impossible to escape.
One motif that appears again and again is when the performers swing parallel to the floor in a laid back position. The first moment this happens nearly takes my breath away—Ciarra D’Onofrio swings in a sweeping arc across the space, inches from the ground, their head thrown back in gentle supplication. Their feet reach through the air as if the sky itself might become a cocoon and carry them away. The image returns as they swing solo, duo, and even as a synchronized flock of five dancers, all hanging from the sky. The swing is generally preceded by a moment of surrender, as the dancer throws themself into the whim of the rope, and then an immediate full-body tautness that keeps their limbs from brushing the ground. This motif captures, for me, a sense of shock and powerlessness familiar from experiences of profound grief, as if literally stunned by the brightness of the world.
Choral music performed live by the Threshold Choir—a group that specializes in singing at the bedsides of those passing away—accompanies the show. In the program, the director of the choir writes that this is the first time these songs are being performed for “an “alive” audience.” The music offers a gentle underbelly to the words and movement, and helps support the emotional tenor of the work, like two hands cupped around something precious. It also creates a profound canvas that, at moments, falls away into stretches of silence, leaving a void that just underlines how small one human life can feel.
A few more images come to me as I write: Liv Schaffer sprinkling handfuls of dust on the stage, over and over and over, like a prayer that eventually becomes material and covers her from head to toe. Olallie Lackler at the microphone speaking with a halting intentionality, as if the words are revealing themselves at the very moment they emerge. Three dancers writhing under a sheer cloth that stretches over their forms like a see-through womb. Their struggle to escape gives way to an overwhelming potency of exposure when the cloth falls away.
At times, the consistent emotional tone of the piece created a certain flatness in my viewing experience. I noticed that towards the end of the work, moments of silence offered a welcome variation from the stunning, but somewhat unchanging energy of the songs. I was also thrilled in the last section of the work when Liv Schaffer broke out for a few phrases of pure dance without a harness, which allowed her to express an entirely different state of dynamism than the constraints of the harnessed movement allowed. This consistent tone prompted me to consider my own experiences of grief even more deeply—where and when had I felt flavors of the emotions evoked by the show, and what textures had I experienced in grief that weren’t captured in this particular work? I imagine the answer might be different for everyone watching. I appreciated the space that was created by the work to sit with these questions, and felt invited to soften into my own experience of grief around a recent loss.
Overall, as the audience rose in a standing ovation, I was struck by the generosity and candor of the piece, and the open-hearted commitment of all the performers. They took on a beast of a topic in creating this work, and managed to do so with beauty and authenticity.
This piece was also published on dance blog "Life As A Modern Dancer" on June 8, 2025. Check it out here.
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