Roslyn Sulcas, NY Times - November 11, 2008

The sounds of howling winds fill the air at the start of Nancy Bannon's "Puncture," a strange, intermittently compelling performance piece at the Chocolate Factory, set in an all-white polar landscape of ice floes and mounds of feathery snow.

As a crepuscular light dawns, one of the mounds shifts, a figure emerges, and a voice begins to chatter. It's an annoying, self-occupied, attention-deficit-disorder voice: that of a female character whose "news" about her life ("I'm dating someone!" "I'm buying a boat!") and thoughts about "getting a cleanse" or becoming a psychologist ("I'm totally going to do this!") pervade and characterize the peculiar world that Ms. Bannon gradually constructs.

That world is filled with other figures who also emerge from the snowy mounds. All are dressed in white, wintry garb (by Ilona Somogyi), hands gloved and heads covered, their eyes ringed in panda black. Gathering in little groups, talking, fighting, embracing, laughing and crying, the nine performers create a microcosm of everyday human life, punctuated by silent passages of repetitive fetal curls on the floor and slow, waving arms reaching overhead.

Some of this is funny and affecting. And some of it strains hard for effect. This discordance may be part of a larger issue that affects the many choreographers who work with text: dancers, whom Ms. Bannon mostly uses (alongside a few actors) in "Puncture," can't always easily transfer their physical skills to speaking ones.

The effect on Friday was uneven. Sometimes the monologues or dialogues were pitch perfect, like an argument between two men, perhaps playing brothers. Just as frequently they sounded weirdly contrived.

Fine performances came from Ava Prince, as an impassive young girl who almost wordlessly communicated an inchoate sense of loss, and from Risa Steinberg, whose gasp of pain as she fell toward the end seemed to sum up all the hurt that the other characters occasionally revealed.

By the end, the sound of the wind was louder; the characters had disappeared one by one; and Ms. Prince was left alone on the darkening stage, before sinking out of sight through a hole. Sarah Watkins's lighting (one of the major strengths of "Puncture") dimmed to a luminous gray, then rose on the audience. We were, apparently, the only survivors.

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