Outstretched
Ruben T. Ornelas and Alaina Olivieri perform Opus, choreographed by Ornelas, at the Multi-Use Community Cultural Center/Rochester Fringe Festival, 9 September 2025. Photo: Annette Dragon.We take up arms but we also use them to hug. Arms are one of our main bodily recourses for reaching out, but they are not wings. We cannot fly. We elbow our way into things, but also push back. Arms brace our falls, but can also break. They say that when outstretched, our arms measure the same distance as our height from head to toe.
In Ruben T. Ornelas’s Opus, performed at the Multi-Use Community Cultural Center as part of the Rochester Fringe Festival, arms were the thing. He and Alaina Olivieri danced a duet below Mitch Goldstein’s mesmerizing Artifact 8, a blinking video project of what looked like horizontal strips of black and gray and white (Goldstein’s video is on display, in very different presentation, at the 69th Rochester-Finger Lakes Exhibition at the Memorial Art Gallery). Mirroring the strips (the video is actually of nails or pins not strips of light, but that’s what they looked like on the screen in the theater), Ornelas and Olivieri kept their arms extended for almost the entire performance. They moved toward each other, playing with the minutiae of arm and hand muscles, tendons, ligaments, but never touched.
Almost like birds in a strange formation, they flocked. You thought they might crash into one another at times, but they never did, even as the accompanying instruments in the music of François Houle’s “Guilemette” threatened to tumble and spill. Almost like airplanes, they buzzed around each other, in appreciation, but knowing they could never touch for the danger of destroying the flight. Almost like tightrope walkers, they used their arms to keep their balance, but also to lean, off kilter, spinning away and then back again toward each other.
They seemed to ask how far one could stretch, but never reach their destination? What did it mean to get to the tip, to the edge, of things, but never touch them? The holding was somehow in the reaching.
