As an aspiring DJ, Racine uses the elements of jazz, classical and trip hop beats to transcend his urban reality and enter a world made right by music.

The Poets Café, a dilapidated tenement building, is filled with squatters who have ritualistic ambient raves during the summer months. It is condemned and slated to be torn down, and its inhabitants, including Couchette, an eccentric dancer who has dreams of moving to Paris, will be evicted along with Racine. The piece explores Racine's relationship with Couchette and the spirits of his ancestors, who visit him in the tenement rooms as he tries to keep his home and life together. Couchette leads him into a series of surreal events and hallucinatory experiences as his history is revealed to him through disjointed remembrances. Visions unfold before him, relentlessly pulling him through vortexes, until he is finally able to come to terms with his reality while standing in the vestibule of a crumbling New York tenement.

Backed by DJ beats, the dancers chant and sing Rux's text as a modern-day Greek chorus, adding gesture and rhythmic dance throughout. Unlike traditional theater, in which one element --text, song or movement--dominates the others, the piece is non-hierarchical, with each component mutually intertwined and reverberating meaning. The worlds of ambient raves, DJ sampling, tenement squats, jazz, botanica remedies and Zuni Indian traditions are all part of Asphalt. The concept of sampling is used extensively, with fragments of text, song, movement and visuals erupting through Racine's firewall of memory. The movement vocabularies of club raves, Latin, African and Comfort's classic gestural language will enhance the urban and surreal elements of Racine's journey.

"Many a dance theater work has tried to explore the theme of "roots," but few can portray the psychological complexity of the issue with the simplicity and power that choreographer Jane Comfort achieves in 'Asphalt.' By the end, 'Asphalt' has achieved what Aristotle said a tragedy must-a catharsis that purges and purifies its witnesses."
-- The Berkshire Eagle

"If theater wants to get its luster back, it needs to start claiming works like Asphalt for itself, and ought not hesitate in welcoming Jane Comfort aboard."
-- The New Republic

"'Asphalt' is more avant-garde than Broadway could ever hope to be."
-- The Day