Review: Fill Your Heart in 'Hollow Apple'

Hollow Apple (2024) by Koresh Dance Company. Photo Credit: Shannon Bramham

By Mingsi Ma

It is hard to find a single word to describe choreographer Ronen Koresh’s work—his choreography language is versatile. I can point out influences like ballet, jazz, hip-hop, ballroom dance, and tap dance, but none defines Koresh’s contemporary dance piece Hollow Apple or Koresh’s choreography. The complex and fast-paced movements demand flexibility in dance languages.

Hollow Apple (2024) had its world premiere earlier this year at the Suzanne Roberts Theatre in Philadelphia in April and now had its first presentation in Pittsburgh last Friday, Oct. 18. As soon as the stage lights illuminate the Koresh Dance Company, the technicality of the dance dazzles the entire Pittsburgh Playhouse. The performance is a chameleon.

There’s no storyline in Hollow Apple, yet it feels like a story for everyone. As the website states, the performance is “inspired by the endless desire to be liked, and loved by strangers, only to reveal our fears of unworthiness.” Instead of a narrative story, Hollow Apple is like an anthology, capturing introspective feelings of doubt, fear, vulnerability, anxiety, frustration, and more without any awkward self-growth lecture.

In “Reflect,” danced by the full company, repetitive, obsessive, restrictive, and angular movements with percussive beats take me back to the feeling of being strangled by daily routine, stuck in the inescapable mundane. The background music by Sage DeAgro-Ruopp includes the tick-tock of a clock and the “dang dang” sound of a train arriving at a station, giving a sense of urgency. There are moments when a group of dancers gather and form a circle, trapping one dancer inside who can’t break free. The interplay of sound and dance brings to mind the anxiety I feel when striving to meet the arbitrary “social clock”.

Without any explanation on stage or off stage, it is up to the audience to project their interiority onto the stage. It is abstract. But as it grips the audience’s hearts to fill the void left by the lack of explanation, Hollow Apple connects everyone with their own realities through a humane touch. To one point, I think the performance goes beyond what it describes itself to be. Still, everyone can find themselves sharing those feelings, just not necessarily under the exact same contexts.

Melissa Rector in “Hear my Call” – Hollow Apple. Photo Credit: Shannon Bramham

My favorite dance is “Hear my Call,” in which dancer Melissa Rector bathes in the blue light by herself while a background male voice hums and mumbles the word “mirror.” As Rector moves her torso in a closed and guarded way, her figure and shadow look lonely on the empty stage. All of a sudden, a light shines on the stage. She chases it with a glimpse of joy, yet it disappears immediately, leaving her to stagger in disappointment. Her dance gives me goosebumps, like a piece of me is up there with her. It’s strange how I see past the stage, transcending time and space, to the mirror I stare into every morning. On bad days, or when I doubt myself, I don’t just see myself. When I look into my eyes, I see fear staring back at me through my pupils .

There’s something comforting in knowing that a work like this can echo and validate the vulnerable yet very true emotions within everyone, and in that way Hollow Apple reminds me of a mirror. It’s a vulnerable and expressive work, completely open to the viewers’ projections of thoughts and emotions as it brings out the deepest yet most universal feelings among us. Everyone can find a place and fill their hearts in Hollow Apple. What you bring with you is what you see on stage.