At NYLA, ‘Terrestrial: The Sprout’ Proposes Drab Future Rituals

Before the lights go down at the start of “Terrestrial: The Sprout,” Germaine Ingram enters, looking regal and wise. She mounts a thronelike platform and about 70 minutes later, at the work’s end, she rises and sings powerfully deep notes and then vanishingly high ones. In between, she holds court by sitting and watching.

“Terrestrial: The Sprout,” which had its premiere at New York Live Arts on Thursday, was advertised as a solo for Ingram, but spoiler alert: This is not a solo in any conventional sense. One by one, other performers appear — nine of them, many emerging from the surrounding audience.

Little of what these performers do, alas, makes much sense or has nearly the impact of Ingram, an esteemed jazz percussive dancer, vocal improviser and oral historian. According to a synopsis, what happens are “invented court/ceremony dances situated in the very distant future.” It appears that in this future we have forgotten a lot about how to dance or make engaging theater. The show is a string of undercooked ideas.

This may be a case of too many cooks. “Sprout,” the first in a proposed series of collaborative projects, has three directors: Makini (formerly known as Jumatatu M. Poe), Nefertiti Charlene Altán and Anderson Feliciano. All three perform. Much attention has been lavished on the costumes (by Lou Pires): deconstructed football pads up top and thongs of different colors on bottom, or drab outerwear that is removed to reveal sparkly outfits, or an all-around cape of floor-length braids with nothing underneath.

What the performers do in those costumes is less developed. Mainly they travel back and forth from one end of the stage to the other, sometimes with sticks — not with the flare of voguers on the catwalk, nor with the simplicity of postmodern pedestrians, just listlessly, stutteringly, as if not sure exactly what they’re doing. Periodically, in squares of video projected on the floor, Makini recites poems: one addressed to a newborn, one to a lover, one that we can’t hear.

Hope rises with the entrance of each new performer, especially the downtown veteran Ishmael Houston-Jones, who appears trailing a stage-length cape. His stage presence focuses the work for a moment, but he is wasted in an under-rehearsed recitation of a tale about his admiration for Venus and an orgasmic experience.

An exception to the general drabness of motion is Brandon Kazen-Maddox, whose running translations are the show’s most graceful, expressive dancing. (Kazen-Maddox is an expert in American Sign Language Artistic Performance.)

Hope rises once more when Minnie Riperton’s “Memory Lane” comes on. Even in a chopped-up mix, the song speaks to the bittersweetness of memory over a 1970s-soul slow groove. Yet only Kazen-Maddox, it seems, knows how to ride it.

Majesty Royale-Jackson keeps appearing to be on the verge of rediscovering that skill. They swirl an invisible ball of energy around, then toss it to Ingram, awakening her. She sings her song, using an approximation of Riperton’s whistle tones and a complex melody we’ve heard before in snatches to deliver lyrics about “an inherited story” larger than history and the indescribable feelings that “Sprout” is trying to express. By then, though, “Sprout” is over.

“Terrestrial: The Sprout”

Through Saturday at New York Live Arts; newyorklivearts.org.