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A Dance of the Unspeakable

Juliana F. May rehearsing her new dance, “Folk Incest,” at Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan. “I’m more interested now in how the dancers make their own choices in the space,” Ms. May said.Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

A rhythmic chant of “don’t do it” rang through the halls of Abrons Arts Center in Manhattan on a recent afternoon. Inside a basement studio, five women were rehearsing a new work by the choreographer Juliana F. May. As they buzzed around the space, what sounded like casual conversation alternated with catchy songs and incantations.

Yet what they said was much darker than how they said it. (Most of the script can’t be printed here.) References to sexual violence and Nazi Germany punctuated the lines of dialogue that flew among the performers. And perhaps because of that dissonance, the text, alarmingly, could be funny at times, even while profoundly unsettling.

In “Folk Incest,” which begins a two-week run at Abrons on Oct. 9, Ms. May, 38, has set out to grapple with what she calls “seemingly unrepresentable” material; that is, to find ways to speak about the unspeakable. While trauma has been a recurring theme in her work, she said she has never before confronted it so concretely.

“I’m looking at my own sexual trauma, and at intergenerational trauma as a Jew,” she said at a restaurant in the Lower East Side. Her mother’s parents, she said, fled from the Holocaust; their parents died in Europe. In particular, she has been contemplating what it means to romanticize or find arousal in traumatic events, whether personal, historical or both.

“Some of it’s about the fantasy of the trauma, which is also a way of dealing with or mastering the trauma,” she said.

A native New Yorker who made her first solo in middle school, Ms. May grew up studying dance composition and improvisation; her early influences included the experimental choreographers Neil Greenberg and Susan Rethorst. In works like “Gutter Gate” (2011) and “Commentary = not thing” (2013), she began combining movement with forms of vocalization: a means, she said, of bringing the audience “into a thick, dense place where we lose a sense of where we are.”

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Lucy Kaminsky, left, and Tess Dworman rehearsing.Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

In “Folk Incest,” she is also commenting on her artistic lineage, on inherited tools of postmodernism and abstraction. “What are the things that I really want to say?” she asked. “Am I abstracting them in order to hide behind those things, because they’re a little bit too scary to say? What do I want to be heard?”

“Folk Incest” is full of movement, with the dancers performing physical tasks as they speak: skipping with shimmying shoulders; striding on tiptoe; pretending to walk a small dog. Yet Ms. May’s focus, she said, has been on developing the text — with great care but not too much delicacy.

“I’m actually interested in being a bit reckless with language,” she said. “To put that danger in the center of the room and find a way to laugh about it, cry about it, to fulfill a range of emotions around a very scary thing.”

Tess Dworman, one of the dancers, said that while she’s uncertain how audiences will receive the work, one thing is clear: “Juliana is not trying to solve anything, any of these huge issues that we’re putting on the table,” she said. “It feels like a natural inclination to reach toward some form of hopefulness, and there’s a bit of that in the piece, but it really stays in the mess of it and just draws that out.”

In person and over the phone, Ms. May spoke about the creation of “Folk Incest.” These are edited excerpts from those conversations.

I found myself laughing sometimes during your rehearsal and thinking, “Should this be funny?”

This is really serious stuff, and thank God for levity. I think humor is the only way to make it a little bit more O.K.

What drew you to working with “unrepresentable” material?

I think trauma is one of the most impossible things to retell or reflect on, aside from explaining the traumatic event itself, which usually gets people stuck on the gory details or the paradigm of victim and perpetrator.

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While there’s text, “Folk Incest” is always in motion, with the dancers like Molly Poerstel, pictured, performing physical tasks as they speak.Credit...Krista Schlueter for The New York Times

It feels important to me to build structures and nonlinear sequences that confuse concrete events and move away from the idea of proof or evidence — to give more space to the unseeable and unspeakable.

Can you say more about the victim/perpetrator paradigm?

I’m really talking about the cycle of abuse that happens within one person. If trauma remains unprocessed, disgust or rage can turn inward to self-harm or externalize itself to others. You yourself can become the perpetrator, and a cycle of abuse continues.

I feel that in myself — my relationship to desire and rage and how at a young age those wires got crossed, and it’s very difficult to untangle them. This work is treading around that crossing and uncrossing of wires.

This piece deals partly with your own experience of sexual trauma. Do you want people to know what exactly that was?

That’s something I’ve really battled. In other processes I’ve collected a lot of text from conversations between my performers. For this we did that somewhat, but mostly I’ve written it. So my experience is there, but I’m still not sure how much I want people to know specifically.

How did you generate the text?

We spent the first six months just talking and recording, and I ended up not using most of what we did. We took breaks, and I spent most of that time writing for six hours every day, playing with dialogue, thinking about these events that have happened to me — about my family, about my father and sister, and the trauma that has persisted in my immediate life but also intergenerationally.

What about the movement?

I used to pride myself on making all the material. But I think my early training as an improviser is coming back, and I’m more interested now in how the dancers make their own choices in the space. I trust them completely to weave the spatial story of the work.

How do you see this work in relation to the #MeToo movement?

I don’t want this piece to be seen as my #MeToo, and I think it could in the context of this political moment. My work has been about this for probably the past 10 years, so my hope is that it’s approaching trauma from a more complicated perspective.

A version of this article appears in print on  , Section C, Page 2 of the New York edition with the headline: Learning to Transcend an Unspeakable Pain. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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