At the closing performance of Chloë Engel’s new solo Autobody, the windows of Pageant are sleeked with a yellow contact wrap, washing the view of Graham Avenue below in a warm yet anemic din. A halting saxophone solo by Tal Frieden is heard from behind us. This sounds like a warm-up for a minute or two before the saxophone begins to throw a fit and create a tangle of sound in the back of the space. 

Watching the yellow screen of Graham Avenue like a movie, with its wrenched jazz soundtrack, the mis-en-scene creates a brief cinematic portrait. The continuous sputter of city life is always the backdrop and the backroom of the show. 

Frieden’s reedy solo clatters to a stop and a body or a door thuds out of sight. The stage is still empty.

The squeaking of wet sneakers comes traveling towards us from the back of the space until Engel emerges, dripping wet in tight cobalt athleticwear, and instantly kneels before a front-seated audience member. 

Maintaining close proximity, Engel begins a series of ritualistic engagements with us: reaching out a wet arm, holding eye contact, then quickly flinging water from their shoulder, down the arm, and off the fingertips onto a seated viewer. They continue and deliver this tense emission to three or four more people. 

Somehow, these opening moments feel like the most intimate and opaque part of the performance. Engel is not so much connecting with us through these methodical and jarring movements, but rather implicating us in their performance from the jump, putting us in the “splash zone.” It also establishes the solo as elemental, or primordial. Tiny pools of water form under Engel’s body while paused before each audience member. 

The difference between solo performance and ensemble work is what it takes to get to opening night. In a group, one can create a kind of hive energy that generates the necessary velocity for an evening-length piece. You cultivate this energy over the rehearsal period, and the work of the choreographer is to organize it outward to the audience. While less might get lost in trying to communicate your ideas when it’s just you in the rehearsal space, the solo performer does have to do the heavy lifting of establishing the kind of rapport with an audience they require for their work to expand. 

After a series of manic motions which seem to be brushing off any dead energy, Engel begins clapping toward us, like a premature congratulations. Malcolm-x Betts, a recent collaborator of Engel’s in Moriah Evans’s latest work, returns the applause, which soon builds into the entire room clapping together in what seems to be a spontaneous outburst. 

As this flurry of sound settles, the main score of the solo unfolds. Engel bounds around the room in improvised and repeated movements, holding the corner of the room before running into the center diagonally, tumbling on their back, and then onto their feet. 

There is a sense here of the dancer trying to “get it right.” They are contending with an inner coach and perhaps relishing a bit in their demands. They are also pushing up against the edges of the performance space in Pageant, sometimes skidding right up to the front row or swinging a limb dangerously close to us. 

The promotional text of the show refers to an angel being driven to rehearsal and the emergency room, evoking a feeling of monotony and dependence, trauma and the divine. Whether you are anticipating a hospital room or the dance studio, there may be a pit or a butterfly in your stomach. Engel’s re-attempts here remind us how the coach’s attention can both be punishing and exhilarating. 

While Engel’s dancing may be edge-blurring, it does not feel untethered. Their slips and turns have that gratifying freedom of a grounded performer getting a little lost in their movements, working up an inner heat to see what the body can do, where it can take them. 

Autobody is about what the body can hold, in terms of personal history but also in physical ability and the potential for pleasure. After the run of the show, Engel mentions wanting this process to untangle very simple, fundamental questions about their process: What is dance? And why does one put on a show? What compels anyone to gather friends and strangers in a room and say, look at me! No, look at me again. For real this time. Our witnessing is merely one side of an agreement. Autobody is a slight, potent contract between the audience and Engel as a performer, a kind of testament to the personal stakes of a life dedicated to “getting it right” in front of us.  

The show ends with a motif also used in Engel’s previous work, the ensemble piece Our Potential at Life World. It involves a vocal track of Adele’s 2021 single “Easy On Me” played over a small JBL speaker attached to a cord, which has been hanging on the wall for the duration of the performance. 

Engel takes the cord from the wall and begins spinning the speaker at a wicked speed above our heads. They wield the tethered speaker and Adele’s contralto like a personal helicopter, as if willing them both toward flight. The song warbles through the increasing velocity of Engel’s cyclone, sounding mutated or submerged in water. The ballad’s emotional power is raw and immediate, almost too powerful. Engel spins the music as if to dominate the sound, bending it to their will, as well as harness its emotion to lift them, and us, like chopper blades out of a chaotic storm. 

The first two times I saw this maneuver performed—in Our Potential and then in a technical rehearsal earlier in the week—it produced a visceral response of fear. I had the impulse to cover my face and protect myself, to watch Engel spin the speaker with one eye closed. Tonight, I’m able to sit up straight without wincing as the song whooshes by thrillingly. I am trusting that Chloë Engel knows how to fly the plane.

Chloë Engel’s Autobody was performed on June 25 and 26, 2026, at Pageant in Brooklyn, New York. Autobody featured sound by Jeremy Wiles Young, saxophone by Tal Frieden, lights by Shana Crawford, and dramaturgy by Nora Raine Thompson.