Experimental dance angst part 2
Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
I have just about circled the entire park and can tell you there’s no such place as the labrynth. Is this part of the performance- thoroughly exhausting and confusing the would be goer?
Originally uploaded by swan lake samba girl via mobile.
I’m supposed to review a dance performance at the labrynth in battery park and noone here has ever heard of the place!
Tomorrow night (Monday, April 21), PBS is airing a dance special honoring America’s national parks. Several choreographers made site-specific dances which were performed in various outdoors national monuments including: Yosemite National Park; the U.S. Virgin Islands; the Coral Reef National Monument off the coast of St. John Island; Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, from which the Wright Brothers first took flight; Mammoth Cave; and Hawaii’s Volcanic national park.
I was fortunate enough to be given an advance preview. My favorite parts were the U.S. Synchronized Swimming Team performing underwater amidst the beautiful corals and exotic sea life of the Virgin Islands, the dancers often looking like tantalizing sea creatures themselves; members of Donald Byrd‘s troupe performing dances evoking freedom and slavery set first on Cinnamon Bay, Virgin Islands, then in ruins of an old Sugar Plantation on St. John’s Island. I also liked the very end, Doug Varone‘s troupe dancing to folk music in the Mammoth Caves. Varone uses film and video in his productions as well, to good effect. I also loved seeing the footage of the Hawaiian volcanic beaches — breathtaking. And Project Bandaloop (whose dancers perform airborne activities, often while climbing large mountainous rocks), whom I know other bloggers like, is included as well.
Overall, I felt this program, which is 90 minutes long, gets bogged down in too much discussion of process – the choreographers trying to figure out what they want to evoke, how best of evoke it, instructing the dancers on the same, the dancers telling us how best they feel they can draw something out, how difficult it can be to do so — it’s too much, and it gets boring and ruins the magic of the performance. Anyway, it’s worth watching for everything I mentioned above even if it gets tedious at points. And since it’s not on until 10:00 (ET), it won’t interfere with Dancing With the Stars 🙂
Just quickly before I go out to meet Ariel (who’s now living in NY :D), here’s my review of “Rhythm of Love” on Explore Dance. Basically the same as what I said here on my blog, but more critical. I sometimes feel badly being critical (especially when reviewing ‘small people’ — biggies like Christopher Wheeldon and Jerome Bel can handle it), but I tried to be constructive and respectful.
Also, for people in New York, the Dance On Camera Festival is currently underway at the Walter Reade Theater in Lincoln Center. A lot of the films are experimental, and most programs have a combination of shorts with small documentaries. On opening night I saw Program 2, which included, most excitingly for me, a 45-minute documentary about (in)famous (depending on your perspective) German choreographer Pina Bausch. This was my first Bausch experience and I definitely can see what people both love and hate about her. Funny because, according to the critics, she doesn’t seem to talk much about her work, so to big Bausch fans the fact that she was actually talking was the draw. To me, though, I wanted her to shut up so I could see more of the excerpts of her work the film provided! In one excerpted piece, women wearing very flimsy nightgowns were violently thrasing their bodies about from the waist down, their hair flying about wildly. It was both beautiful and disturbing. In another, one woman screamingly commanded another woman to smile, the woman being yelled at tried but her smile wasn’t big enough to please the first woman, so woman #1 violently dunked the second woman’s head into a bucket of water several times. You can hear the audience’s upset. In another excerpt, a man reaches down under a woman’s dress and lifts her up, seemingly by the crotch. In its awkwardness, it is both unsettling and comical. If you saw the film “Talk To Her” by Pedro Almodovar, her choreography is performed at the very beginning, but from what I saw on Wednesday, that seems to be a very watered-down version of her work.
Anyway, I am now dying to see her dance group (Tanztheater Wuppertal), if they ever make it to NY. Art had his first Bausch experience this year as well, live at UCLA, and he seems as smitten as I! Here’s dance writer Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s take on the Bausch doc and another short in Program 2, and here is a post on the same by Anna Brady Nuse (who is a dance filmmaker). For a good, detailed break-down of the whole festival, visit Anna’s blog post here.
It’s already the second day of 2008 (Happy New Year everyone!) and I’m just now getting my best of last year up; sorry so late! I was tagged by Jen & Jolene, so I’ll formulate my “best of” as a response to their survey:
1) Best Performance of the Year: I had many favorites, but I guess overall I’ll have to say Alessandra Ferri’s farewell performance with ABT in Romeo & Juliet at the Met. She was my favorite ballerina for many years and I’m still missing her. Plus, I was introduced to La Scala’s Roberto Bolle, who guest performed 😀
2) Best Male Performer of the Year: Definitely Clifton Brown of Alvin Ailey!
3) Best Female Performer of the Year: I thought a lot about this, and I know I’m mixing dance genres, but I’m going to say Yulia Zagoruychenko. She had a damn good year. She, with Max Kozhevnikov, made the Latin finals at Blackpool this year, being the only US couple to do so, then, later in the year, went on to displace the several-year-long U.S. National champs to win that title. At the end of the year, she survived a partner change and went on to win her first competition with him, Riccardo Cocchi. She is adored by many both nationally and internationally and she is very deserving of her hard-won success. Go Yulia and Riccardo!
4) Best New Discovery of the Year: This is too hard because there were so many dancers and choreographers whom I was introduced to this year who aren’t necessarily new to the scene, but just to me! List includes: choreographers Camille A. Brown, Luca Veggetti, Luciana Achugar, Kyle Abraham, and Robert Battle; composer Nico Muhly; dancers Kirven Boyd, Antonio Douthit and Yannick LeBrun (all of Alvin Ailey — the last I forgot to mention in my last post on AA; fortunately Susan reminded me in her comment!), and Roberto Bolle (who was new to me this year); Brazilian troupe Mimulus; Nora Chipaumire of Urban Bush Women (pictured above this number) at the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival; the Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival itself (it’s been around for aeons, but I had my first experience there this year). That’s all I can think of for now, but I’m sure I’ll think of bizillions of people I forgot later…
5) Best Regional / Local Performance of the Year: I think this is more of a theater question since there’s usually a big distinction between regional theater and a Broadway show, or a company who tours, but, since physically it was “local,” I’ll say NYCB’s spring season opening night. It was just too much fun watching all those celebrities walk down that red carpet and overhearing goofy crowd comments, and then writing about it all (although my mother was aghast at me for my using the word “whores” in my blog title!)
6) Best Performance in a Non-Traditional Venue: This is a toss-up between the wonderful “Accounting For Customs” performed on the steps of the US Customs House, and the super fun and impossible-to-tear-yourself-away-from Lincoln Center ‘drive-in,’ David Michalek’s “Slow Dancing” films.
7) Favorite Televised Theater Event: I didn’t really have a favorite in this category (since the only thing I saw fitting it was Mark Morris’s “Mozart Dances” on PBS which I didn’t care for), so I’ll just state my favorite dance TV show, which was SO YOU THINK YOU CAN DANCE. Duh.
8) Biggest Dance Obsession: Alvin Ailey, Alvin Ailey, Alvin Ailey. Again, if you’ve read my blog over the past several weeks, Duh 😀
9) Most Likely To Be The Next Big Thing: Eee. Hard! So hard to predict. But I’m going to name a few: ABT’s Blaine Hoven and Vitali Krauchenka,
Kirven Boyd and Antonio Douthit at Alvin Ailey,
Craig Hall at NYCB,
choreographer Camille A. Brown…
Again, I’m sure I’m leaving people out…
10) Most Anticipated Performance Of 2008: Eee, another tough one. There are so many things I’m looking forward to this year. I guess the biggest is going to be Blackpool. Since the current decade-long Latin champs retired last year, there will be a new Latin winner, which is really exciting to me since it’s my favorite event there. I’m hoping for Slavik Kryklyvyy and Elena Khvorova,
I’m also looking forward to Twyla Tharp’s new ballet that ABT will premiere in the Spring at the Met,
And I’m looking forward to Nikolaj Hubbe’s farewell performance with NYCB (he is returning to Denmark). Not that I’m looking forward to bidding him farewell, but to the show NYCB will put on in his honor.
Okay my brain is tired now. If anyone else wants to add their “best ofs” in a comment here or on their own blog, please do so!
I the weekend largely looking at art. On Friday night, my friend Dee and I went to the Whitney’s Kara Walker exhibit, “My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love,” about slavery and the Ante-Bellum South, which was excellent, and something everyone who has a chance should see. And the night before, my friend Alyssa invited me an opening of Shinique Smith’s show, “All Purpose,” at the Moti Hasson gallery in Chelsea.
This piece is titled “Thank You, Come Again.” I turned off my flash, because I’m always afraid it’s going to hurt the artwork, so the pics are a bit blurry, but this one’s comprised of several articles of clothing, all clumped together and affixed to the wall, a few scraggly threads trailing from the bottom looking to me almost like blood or tears, and a pile of socks with a sole red rose in the center beneath the wall hanging, on the floor.
Smith basically assembles her artwork from used / found objects, which reminded me of John Jasperse. Alyssa, who’s an Art history grad student specializing in African, told me using found objects rather than buying new is big among African artists right now because it symbolizes a rebellion against colonialism, globalization and the cultural imperialism of the West. (Smith is from Baltimore, but apparently is associated with African artists.)
I thought this one was charming. (Unfortunately, the gallery didn’t have the names of the artwork in its press release or on its website, so I don’t know all the names of the pieces). To me this looks like an animal, like a donkey, and I found the “head” and “ears” sweet because they’re made of a satiny fabric and tulle respectively, making me think of dance of course. Alyssa thought it looked “flamenco.” But the animal, who is carrying several adorable stuffed animals on its shoulders, appears to be carrying heavy bags on its side as well, so it looks a bit overburdened though not downtrodden.I liked this one because it made me think of Ian McEwan‘s novel “Enduring Love.” There was a rope attaching the crate to a pole in the ceiling, so it resembled a hot air balloon, and that book opens with a horrifying hot air balloon ride gone heinously wrong. The doe at the bottom is nostalgic to me, maybe because it looks like something my grandparents would always keep in a glass cabinet in their living room.
This one, the ‘star’ piece, is called “Glutton.” It was made of gilded cushions, with a red velvet blanket spilling out underneath. Alyssa and her friends thought it looked like a Buddha, which I guess it does, but is Buddha associated with gluttony? I found it beautiful but somewhat hideous at the same time; like incredible wealth and how it can be so striking but can also pervert or uglify.
Alyssa in foreground with friends Alison and Kim (who is an artist in Connecticut) in back. We joked about how Alyssa is becoming the “Where’s Waldo” of my blog 🙂 It was a very well-attended opening.
Anyway, I really enjoyed it, just walking around sipping Vodka (compliments of the exhibit’s sponsor), chatting with friends, and observing, investigating the art, trying to figure out how it was assembled, what materials it was made of, what all of the component objects were, what the work as a whole meant, symbolized, or evoked for me. The whole exhibit had kind of an air of nostalgia to me and made me a bit sad, sweet as the sculptures or wall figures were.
But it made me think about Jasperse too. I liked a lot of Smith’s pieces, but nothing really blew me away the way Jasperse’s clothes hanger sculpture / set did, the same way that none of his choreographic uses of found objects knocked me out like the hangers. And yet overall I still really enjoyed the Smith exhibit. But I was hard on Jasperse, coming away from the performance generally more disappointed. And I wonder why that is… if it’s that I expect more from dance (or something different anyway), if it’s that I spend more time with a dance performance, or more money on it (assuming I’m not buying the artwork anyway). Maybe it’s that I was physically closer to the art, could investigate it more thoroughly and take my time with it, or maybe it’s just that the drink and friendly chatter added to my enjoyment? … Anyway, after this exhibit, I felt like I shouldn’t have been as hard on Jasperse.
Another interesting discussion ensued amongst us ladies: whether you need to know something about the artwork in order to appreciate it or whether a work of art should stand entirely on its own. Funny to me because Jolene and I had just had a similar discussion on her blog (see comments here) regarding the two new abstract ballets ABT just put on. Alison said she didn’t necessarily need to know very much about a work, but titles and little notes did help. Sometimes. For example, the title in the top piece, “Thank You, Come Again,” which the artist’s note says is made from “ex-boyfriend’s clothes,” made her realize the pile of socks wasn’t just a mound of dirty underwear sitting on the floor for no purpose, they were remnants of the subject’s ex and they illustrated her sorrow and emptiness, a feeling made all the more powerful by the rose in the middle.
But, Alison added, Mark Rothko (whose art at least in his later years was extremely abstract, usually consisting of a sole geometric shape or different colored horizontal lines on a canvas) could give detailed names to all of his paintings until he was blue in the face and she would still see only abstract shapes.
I remember from the Kara Walker exhibit a drawing of an old white man, shirtless and with saggy male breasts, who was kind of breast-feeding a black baby. But he didn’t look so happy about it; rather, he tried to shield his rather disgusted expression from the baby’s mother. The image was striking and I kind of understood the racial aspect, but it meant so much more when I read in the curator’s explanation that the white man was famous abolitionist John Brown. So Walker is commenting upon the futility of white-led abolitionism and questioning the patriarchal reverence with which this man is held.
Another silhouette appeared to me, on first look, like a woman was jumping up excitedly, kicking her heels in the air, doing a little happy dance. But it also looked like her wrist was falling off and there was a spill on the ground below her that looked like a big mess. After reading the curator’s words I realized it was a pool of blood; she’d slit her wrist, and was dancing in excitement because by committing suicide, she’d freed herself and performed her own small role in abolishing slavery by depriving it of property.
Even just the silhouettes themselves: I hadn’t realized this little decorative art form was a fixture of, first aristocratic, then haute-bourgeois households, the poser usually being a delicate white woman; in fact, portraiture technique in the 1800s became a way of training “good ladies.” So, by painting most of her subjects in this way, Walker was turning an upper-class white art form on its head. The curator’s notes also say that the silhouette mimics the reductiveness of stereotypes, which I thought of as I was viewing the exhibit. But not knowing the history of silhouettes, I would have missed out on the class issue.
Anyway, sorry this post is all over the place. I’m starting to blab so am going to go to bed now. I also just wanted to point out that there’s a great conversation taking place on Apollinaire’s blog regarding dance-makers’ obligations to their audiences. Go here to take part. The dance blogosphere is becoming fun!
Last night I had my first Jerome Bel experience at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. I went to see the latest work by the French experimental choreographer known for refusing to return the money of disgruntled customers, entitled “Pichet Klunchun and myself.” In the piece, which the program says is an exploration of “very problematic notions such as euro-centrism, inter-culturalism or cultural globalization,” Bel and Thai dancer Klunchun (who is brilliant, by the way) sit on chairs across from each other, Bel with a laptop on his knees. Bel first interviews Klunchun, asking him about his work, Thai culture, the type of dance he practices — “Khon” — a centuries-old Thai dance, and asks him to illustrate various moves. Klunchun then queries Bel about the same regarding himself. The first half of the program I found fascinating and I recommend that everyone in NYC go see it (showing through Saturday, the 10th) for that reason alone.
Khon, Klunchun reveals, began with a Thai king, who danced himself, and is a celebration of Buddha. The body is literally like a temple, the Buddha contained within both the center of the body and the center of the temple. So, arms legs, hands and feet, like Thai architecture, are shaped so that the energy flows out from the center, down through the limbs and rooftop structures, and is then re-directed back to the center, to the Buddha of the temple and soul. That’s why Thai dancers hold their hands and feet as such, which the fingers and toes splayed and flexed outward and upward. After he gives this explanation and begins dancing, you can really see the arcs of energy radiating out and back and out and back. Thai dancers practice flexing their fingers backward, and he shows us how. Ouch! Bel tried to flex his own, but to no avail. I tried as well, equally unsuccessful. It looks like it takes as much work as balletic turnout.
I found his this fascinating, along with Klunchun’s illustrations. At one point, he walks slowly slowly slowly across the room, showing how the spirit of a character who has died inhabits the stage (this after Bel asks him to feign dying onstage and Klunchun says he can’t; for a character to die onstage is for the king to die, for the country to die). Anyway, in his walks, the feet slowly lift from the floor, almost toe by toe, then the knee slowly bends, the leg rises, lifts, extends out, bends, the foot slowly drops to the floor, the step only ending when the last toe has touched ground. I can’t explain — you just have to see for yourself — but it was mesmerizing. His movements were so perfectly stylized down to the very last detail, so formalized, not a skin cell out of place. It really made me want to see the Thai dancer in David Michalek’s Slow Dancing films again, especially now that I understand the movement. He illustrated the four main characters of Khon: male, female, demon, and monkey — demon being his specialty; monkey he can’t do to save his life (my word choice of course; his language, like his dancing was very formal and ascetic). At first I couldn’t see the difference between the characters, but after Bel asked him to explain, I understood. Everything is so subtle. You have to watch really closely. And you will because it’s really so breathtaking in its simplicity. When Klunchun finally danced the role of a woman learning that her husband had died, I understood every movement, every discreet but articulated gesture to a tee. Beautiful! Bel thought so too.
Throughout Bel’s interrogatories, there were little culture clashes, most of which I felt were forced and contrived. Bel exclaims to Klunchun that Western dance (meaning ballet) also originated from a king — King Louis. But it’s a superficial similarity, of course, as, far from having the energy re-directed to one’s inward Buddha: the French king demanded that his court dancers have their bodies always turned not straight ahead, but toward him, thus the balletic turnout. “You direct your energy out,” Klunchun says at one point, demonstrating a very funny faux grand jete. “Out, out, out,” he said as he leaped through the air throwing his arms up. He was really quite an actor and could be very funny in his deadpan seriousness.
Then Bel turned the tables and asked Klunchun what he would like to know. After the exchange of some personal details intended to reveal cultural differences (Klunchun doesn’t understand how Bel can be unmarried and have a child, for example), Bel gets up and illustrates his work. He plays music from his computer. The song is “Let’s Dance” by David Bowie. Bel walks to center stage and stands stationary, looking out at the audience, eyeing us left to right. After about a minute, he begins jumping around, breaking into an unsophisticated version of club dance. After another minute or two of doing that, he sits. Klunchun, playing the outsider / voice of reason asks him, basically, WTF?? (my words again). Bel explains that in France they had a Revolution during which commoners overthrew all of the royals, sparing no family members. Hence, long live the French principle of egalite. He is deconstructing the spectator / performer dichotomy, showing the audience that he is just like them, no better. “But why then would they pay?” asks the voice of reason. “Well, they sometimes want their money back, in fact,” says Bel. The audience erupts with laughter — clearly these are all Bel groupies in the know about his history. “And do you give it back?” asks Klunchun. “No.” You see, Bel explains, he is a “contemporary” artist — this means not ballet, not Swan Lake, not the Nutcracker. “Contemporary” means there can be no expectations, no preconceived notions. It’s in the present. The government pays him a lot of money to go out and do research on this present state of things, about which he then produces work. He walks back to center stage, throws a vase of pencils and other small object onto the floor, falls down, and pretends to fall asleep atop the objects. Not to sound like a philistine, but I really don’t understand what kind of research one needs to do in order to come up with this, Mr. Bel?
Later, Bel talks about the work I think he is most known for, “Jerome Bel,” in which a man and woman, both naked, come out onstage, stand, look down at their bodies, and begin scrunching together a role of fat from their waists, which they kneed up and down and all around, distributing the fat throughout their torsos. “The body is such a marvel in and of itself,” Bel exclaims orgiastically, “who needs movement!” With this piece, he says, he was trying to explore the bare essentials of theater. What better way to do that than by having a stage with no props, no costumes and hardly any light?
Okay, knowing me, this is the kind of thing I would have thought was brilliant — or maybe not brilliant but something I would have at least been into — when I was in college, so I do see where he has his followers. After last night, I have decided that I am not, however, one of them, if my tone hasn’t made that obvious. Having only seen this one piece of his, though, I could be missing something. Here is another perspective from someone I highly admire.
At the end, Bel has just finished sleeping onstage for several minutes to “Killing Me Softly,” when he gets up and begins to pull down his pants. “No, no,” Klunchun stops him. “I don’t, I don’t want to see you naked, Mr. Bel, it is not right.” “Why,” says Bel unzipping. “Because in Thailand, there are certain people you, you don’t share nakedness with,” Klunchun says visibly distraught. “But, Mr. Klunchun,” Bel snickers, “in Bangkok clubs, there’s lots of nudity.” “That’s different,” Klunchun says, averting his eyes, unable to hide a look of disgust, “they’re, they’re working.” “I’m working too,” Bel says with the tone of a high-schooler. “But in Bangkok, they’re working for tourists.” With this the Bel groupies moaned as if the skies had parted. The international trafficking of women as sex slaves has long been one of the most disturbing social issues to me, so this may well not be everyone’s reaction, but I found it completely insulting that Bel assumed that I didn’t already know the truth of Klunchun’s last line, that that was supposed to be a revelation to me as a white person.
Anyway, as I said, “Pichet Klunchun and myself” is totally worth seeing for Klunchun alone. Who knows, you may up enjoying the deconstructionist French guy as well. Go here for tix.
Last night I went to see experimental choreographer John Jasperse‘s new work “Misuse Liable to Prosecution” at BAM’s Harvey theater in Brooklyn. Fun night! I went with Tony Schultz from the Winger, and we met up with some of his friends, one of whom is Ashley Byler, an up and coming choreographer who also contributes to the Winger and just landed a coveted residency at experimental dance venue Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea. (Her first show will be in May.) We all went out for drinks and little foodie things afterward at nearby Scopello, which I loved. Very good food, spacious comfy area and very decent prices. I guess this is why people live in the outer boroughs… Everyone was so smart and it was a great time hanging out and talking about dance and art and Jasperse and Chuck Close and Labannotation, and all kinds of compelling stuff! I didn’t get home until early this morning, which is why I’m late with my review…
Anyway, Jasperse. Ashley and Tony loved it, I liked but didn’t love it, but thought certain parts were brilliant. According to the program notes, Jasperse began with the idea, “What is it like to exist in a capitalist society with little or no capital?” Sets and props are comprised of other people’s discarded items — clothes hangers, brooms, milk crates, bottles, etc., which Jasperse and his group of four dancers seek to re-invent, finding new, poetic meaning in society’s refuse. So, I guess by finding new uses and meaning in what society deems trash, while starting with the initial capitalist question, he is in a roundabout way perhaps questioning what a capitalist society finds meaningful (work that produces money) and what it doesn’t (experimental art / art in general).
I felt that the most brilliant reinvention of trash was the set. As I walked into the theater, my eye was immediately drawn to the stage, which looked ablaze with gleaming white holiday lights weaved into some kind of intricate snowflake formation. It was really breathtaking. Once I sat down and looked more closely though, I realized the Christmas lights were actually about 1,000 ordinary clear plastic clothes hangers. The way the plastic was lit by stage lights produced the glowing effect. It reminded of a sculpture I once saw in an American exhibit in the then newly-opened Kiasma Museum of contemporary art in Helsinki. From afar this striking piece hanging from the ceiling looked like a gorgeous chandelier. But on closer inspection I realized it was made entirely of chicken bones, which made me momentarily disgusted. I had to walk away, but I then kept returning to that piece, it was so jarringly mesmerizing. When I first saw the coat hanger sculpture, part of which hung quite close to the stage, forcing the dancers to interact with pieces of it, I thought it was brilliant. I felt that the movement, though, just didn’t rise to that same level.
As four dancers walked slowly around the stage carefully balancing several tied-together broomsticks on their heads, Jasperse came up front, sat on a milk crate (the name of the work, by the way, comes from a warning on a milk crate, which is really rather funny when you think about it — what possible wrongful, prosecution-inducing uses are there for a milk crate?), propped an orange traffic cone on top of a broomstick, and used the cone as a bullhorn reading various economic statistics through it: Judge Judy’s salary is something like $26 million more than that of all of the United States Supreme Court justices combined (which enrages me), employees of small arthouse BAM make half of what those of Manhattan’s posh Lincoln Center do, how much our government spends on the Iraq war as compared to funding for the arts (don’t even ask), how much money Jasperse makes ($26,000), and his various expenses, including those involved in transporting props to the studio, rehearsal space fees, food, and, most audience-wowing, his apartment — $500 a month, in the Village! Well, that’s certainly a thing of value, Mr. Jasperse! (For non-New Yorkers, the average teensy one-bedroom in the Village is currently going for $3350, says my friend who is looking.)
Anyway, after these stats are read, Mr. Jasperse joins the other dancers interacting with various props. Music is played by a woman (musician Zeena Parkins) standing off to the side wearing a mini-dress made of FedEx envelopes who plays a homemade industrial-looking harp. Bagpipes occasionally sound from above, from musicians standing on the balcony sides.
Some of my favorite moments: a dancer brings Mr. Jasperse a large box containing an item he seems to have purchased. He opens the box, finds a bean bag chair. He takes the chair out and looks quizzically at it, as the dancer throws the open box over his head. He takes the box off and begins playing with the bean bag chair, eventually with others, who throw it at each other like a giant hacky sack. Eventually, when the players tire of the game, Jasperse winds up with the bean bag chair over his head, walking around stage completely unable to see or breathe, stumbling into the clothes hanger sculpture. So, it’s like he’s been consumed by his own consumption.
Another favorite moment: four dancers take off their jeans. They then sit down on the ground and meticulously begin to fold the pants, like you see Banana Republic and Gap employees often doing. As soon as they’ve smoothed them all out, ready to be presented to the customer on the display table, the dancers lie down on them, use them as bed and blanket, wend their feet through the pants legs, eventually getting all tangled up. They then rise, untangle themselves, take the pants in one hand, grab the bottom of a leg, and begin whirling them around over head like a lasso. They whip the pants at the floor, each other, and eventually into the back wall. I saw in this well-founded anger at all those horrendous chain stores that have completely taken over and all but ruined parts of the city like SoHo, which, for non-New Yorkers, used to be the gallery district and is now basically a mall.
At another point, a male and female dancer take a clothes line on which several garments are hung, lie down, and, using only their feet, somehow weave the clothes all into the woman’s top. She ends up a Humpty-Dumpty-esque literal “stuffed shirt.”
A part the audience found amazing, judging by the ooohs and aaaahs: two women roll out a sheet as if they’re about to have a picnic. They disappear into the wings and return with several water bottles, which they put onto their picnic cloth. They disappear again, making me think they were going to get their baskets filled with food. But instead they return with more bottles, then more and more, until it’s not they who are having a picnic at all but the water bottles themselves. They then lie on the sheets amongst the bottles, and, using only their feet and legs, scrunch up the sheet so that eventually they have several water bottles lined up between their legs. They lift their legs in the air, rotate them, the bottles still held tightly between legs, then one by one deposit each bottle into the sheet, still using only their legs. I guess it is a difficult feat, but what was this supposed to mean? At another point, one which takes up a large part of the whole, a mattress is brought out and dancers thrash themselves at it, the mattress eventually enveloping a dancer as had the bean bag chair earlier. But the bean bag chair had arrived in a box, so it was like a purchase; the mattress was just lugged out onstage. A lot of these kinds of uses of the props were comical and interesting and involved difficult feats using entwined limbs, but some of them I couldn’t figure any meaning into, and none had the poetry of the clothes hanger set.
At the end, Jasperse returns to his traffic-cone megaphone and tells the audience that he couldn’t really figure out how to end the piece. He thought of lining the theater’s edges with explosives and setting them off like firecrackers so that the walls would fall like dominoes and the ceiling would open up so we could see the sky. The audience cracked up at this. Realizing that wouldn’t do, he asked us all to take a deep breath and open our imaginations instead. He gave us a moment to do so, then told us all he hoped we enjoyed the rest of our evenings. It felt like the end of a yoga class.
I guess it’s kind of one of those things where everyone takes away something different. Here’s Counter Critic’s review, and here’s Jennifer Dunning’s in the Times. It’s showing tonight and tomorrow, go here for tix.
Last night I went to see the second in the three-work series “Sitelines” — site-specific dance performances organized by the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, taking place at various downtown locales. This one, entitled “States & Resemblance,” was choreographed by Dean Moss and Japanese video artist Ryutaro Mishima, and took place on a nice little elevated park overlooking the East River that I hadn’t even known existed.
Above is a picture of the scene. Painted on the ground was an ambiguous grey splotch dotted with several large black spots that spilled out of the grey and all around the park’s winding paths. One such path led to a larger grassy lawn, where they are apparently showing a series of several old films shot in NY as part of the River to River festival (all these fun outdoor festivals in NYC during the summer!)
Well, I’m not entirely sure what to make of the piece, so I’ll describe it. The performance began in the lawn area, with Moss and Mishima running and jumping around playfully. I’d seen an earlier draft of this at the Nothing Festival at Dance Theater Workshop a few months ago, and there the men were naked. Here, they were nearly so, wearing only resplendent white dance belts, which, because of their sheen, were actually rather beautiful.
After cavorting around the lawn with each other for a few minutes, an Asian woman (whom the program notes is Indonesian mask artist Restu Imansari Kusumaningrum) dressed in shiny skirt and top, emerged from the park and walked to the edge of the lawn ringing a bell. That signaled for the men to walk into the park, where, in the center atop the dots, they slowly and soberly put on pants and button-down shirts — casual work clothes. The woman wandered around the park for a while, ringing the bell every so often while the men, after dressing, stood on the main grey area, first doing a series of poses during which their hands then arms would slowly begin to quiver, then a series of balances on one foot.
Suddenly, Mishima turned on Moss, attacking him. The men fought, jumping at and bouncing off each other, struggling with each other, with Moss trying to make peace with Mishima but Mishima resisting. While this happened, Kusumaningrum found a place in the grass to sit peacefully, where she donned a face mask.
Mishima eventually broke free from Moss and walked to the outer edges of the sidewalk, to where the crowd was sitting, and began laughing and singing at us aggressively and haughtily, momentarily a bit frightening. Kusumaningrum, disrupting the crowd by moving to various areas of the park, tried on a series of masks. Moss, now walking very slowly and hunched over like an old man, approached Mishima, who picked up a television set whose screen bore a close-up of an elderly person grinning widely, many teeth missing, and confrontationally thrust the screen out at the crowd.
Eventually, the two men went into a back area of the park and sat down in the high grass, hiding themselves from the audience. Kusumaningrum walked out to the center area, lay down and thrashed about on the ground, donning another mask. Eventually she stopped and pointed to the area where Moss and Mishima were sitting. The men slowly rose. Over each of their faces was taped a large black dot, the same as were spotting the ground.
So what does all this mean? Well, the little blurb on the Sitelines flier tells us that it is intended to be “a meditation on the pain, beauty, and inevitability of how things, people, and experience pass away … reflect(ing) on the process of aging as one of the most binding aspects of our existence.”
I could definitely see the aging in the way the men acted boyishly, playfully on the lawn, near naked, in an innocent beatific state, then as if called by their mother, or by time, to grow up and don career clothes. I could see Mishima’s attempt to defy the passage of time by lashing out against Moss, who nevertheless eventually grew into an old man, taking Mishima with him. At the end, the large black dots covering their faces suggests ashes to ashes, dust to dust, our bodies do eventually become part of the earth, part of the environment, and thus timeless. I didn’t completely get the significance of the masks, unless they were meant to convey in another way how we try to evade and hide, pretend, develop facades?
I’m sure there are plenty of other interpretations as well. In general, I find this kind of postmodern / experimental dance intriguing and fun so long as there’s enough there for you really to cull something from it all and come up with various analyses. I definitely felt like there was enough here to do that. Here’s a write-up on the piece by Gia Kourlas in TONY. It’s showing a few more times this week and next; go here for the schedule.
For the past two weeks, choreographer Tere O’Connor’s “The Nothing Festival” which took place at Dance Theater Workshop in Chelsea and just concluded this weekend has been the talk of the town. Basically, in an effort to explore how meaning is produced in dance, O’Connor asked eight modern / post-modern choreographers to choreograph a 30-minute piece starting from “nothing” — that is, with no preconceived concept. The first set of four choreographers — Douglas Dunn, HIJACK, Sam Kim, and Dean Moss — showed their work during the first week’s performances; the second set of four — Jon Kinzel, Luciana Achugar, Susan Rethorst, and Walter Dundervill — the second week; and sandwiched in between, on the afternoon of the 21st, was a four-hour-long panel discussion moderated by O’Connor and including all eight choreographers (which is pictured above). O’Connor also led shorter discussions following each weekday performance with the choreographers whose work was being shown on that night. Doug Fox from the Great Dance blog and I attended the April 21st discussion and the first set of performances that night, and I attended the second set on the 25th.
As I said, this festival has been the talk of the dance town, and so much has already been said, that I don’t have a tremendous amount to add. But since no one has talked at length about Achugar’s work, and since it was my personal favorite, I’m going to focus on that piece. First, though, for anyone who doesn’t know about the festival and wishes to explore the ideas and bit of controversy it engendered, I’ll be a good blogger and try to point to everything that’s already been said:
First, go here for TONY dance editor Gia Kourlas’s very useful interview with O’Connor; critic Roslyn Sulcas wrote an early and much debated critique of the idea behind the festival but that is unfortunately no longer available to non-NYTimes subscribers so linking is pointless; for Newsday critic Apollinaire Scherr’s initial write-up, go here; for a first set of responses to that, including O’Connor’s, go here; for Doug’s comments to Apollinaire, go here; for my own musings to Apollinaire on the April 21st discussion, go here; for critic Eva Yaa Asantewaa’s analysis, go here; for Doug Fox’s coverage on his own blog, go here and here; for Village Voice’s Deborah Jowitt’s very thorough review, go here; and finally, for Jennifer Dunning’s NYTimes review of the whole festival, go here. I think I got it all; if I didn’t, I apologize!
As a relative newcomer to the post-modern dance scene, my only expectation going into this festival was that I was going to learn something about the relation between dance and meaning. This festival definitely met my expectations on that front. Although I often felt during the April 21st discussion that I was kind of eavesdropping on a debate already well underway and some of the language used (while giving me a certain nostalgia for my grad school days 🙂 ) was a bit foreign to me, I still got the overall sense of great frustration dance-makers feel when trying to apply for grants to funders focused on the commercial value of the project and their need to know details of what the piece is about before it is even begun, as well as their deep annoyance at dance critics who, some choreographers feel, impose their own pre-conceived notions of what dance is and is not in determining, and recommending, whether something is worth seeing. I had some strong feelings about the discussion, which I posted as a comment on Scherr’s blog, and which she responded to (which I linked to above but will again), so am not going to repeat that here. In general, several critics were in attendance and it was really interesting to see them interact with the choreographers; at one point things got heated, but I appreciated that because I felt like serious frustrations were vented and deeper discussion came out of it. O’Connor had just embarked on a dialog with former Village Voice writer Elizabeth Zimmer on what is important in viewing a dance — is it just the beauty of the movement or is there more? — when time limitations forced an abrupt end. In the end, I love the discussion that the festival engendered, both on April 21st and in all of the newspapers and blogs, and I hope there can be more like it.
So, the performances: overall, my favorite piece — which is not at all to say it was “the best” but just that it spoke to me the most — was Luciana Achugar’s “Franny and Zooey” (not a direct relation to the book by Salinger, as the choreographer explained at the post-show discussion). I’m not sure exactly why it was my favorite — it just seemed to have the most going on in it that I could relate to. It began with spotlights jumping around, shining out on various places on the stage and in the audience. At points, while focused on the audience, it was rather blinding. The spotlight ended on a woman who ran out onstage and collapsed to the ground, where she lay, seemingly unconscious. The focus then changed to a video projected on the back wall showing a woman — Achugar — in a studio warming up, then trying to organize her movements into a dance. Unexpectedly, two cats, named Franny and Zooey, pets of the studio owner, entered, plopped down on the floor and began doing cat things — bathing, sleeping, curiously human-watching… Achugar tried to shoo them away, since, as she revealed post-show, she was allergic, but for the most part, the cats were oblivious. Slowly, the focus — both Achugar’s and the viewer’s, came to be on them. I noticed as they got up, shifted in space, and pranced around, how balletic and dancer-like the cats were balancing as they did toward the balls of their paws (if paws have balls that is!), looking all weightless and feathery, and the dramatic things they can do with those tails, waving them about in the air. I remember when my cat was still alive how much I wanted a tail 🙂 — such an instrument of expression! Anyway, Achugar seemed to share my thought, as soon she crouched down on all fours and began imitating the cats. Throughout this videotaped activity, female dancers — four in all besides Achugar — took the stage and danced. At one point, the video was turned off and the women approached the audience, the tops of their dresses unbuttoned provocatively. As they took to the aisles, walking very slowly, they looked directly at audience members in each row, making sure to make eye contact. It was slightly uncomfortable for me, and I thought of this activity along with the initial blinding spotlights shined out on the audience, as turning the spectator / looked at, viewer / viewed relationship on its head — now the gaze of the women, provocatively dressed and soon to be naked — was turned on us, making us complicit in their world, kind of in the manner of Manet’s Olympie… Achugar, on the video, soon disrobed as she crawled around, cat–like on the studio floor. In the end, the women lift up the real Achugar, lying on the stage floor, all engage in a playful romp in which clothes wind up being shed, then dance around the stage naked, jovially and “unashamed” to use Dunning’s word. While there may have been no fully fledged story, I felt like there were hints of body image issues overcome, exploration of range of human movement and notions of beauty through casting a watchful eye on another species, and, as I said, challenging the dichotomy of the (traditionally female) watched versus watcher.
Parts of other pieces caught my eye too (but I won’t go into as much detail or this post would be 100,000 words long): the contrast both literally and stylistically between Walter Dundervill’s movement (that man can really dance and he’s very sexy — I wish I could move like him!) and the constricting, corseted 18th Century costumes — it was a spectacle just to watch him dress his dancers; Susan Rethorst’s depiction of a large group of women humorously vying for space in the tiny apartment she is now forced to work from after losing her studio to skyrocketing rents, and her ability as a dancer to evoke profundity from such a simple, very human, everyday gesture as shoulder shrugging — Dunning remarked on this too; and, as I mentioned in my comment to Apollinaire, I was struck visually by Sam Kim’s piece in which two women, wearing lacey white dresses, inch-long darkly polished fingernails, and their hair long and unruly — sometimes prettily feminine, sometimes montrously out-of-control, by turns caress, madly fight, then placate each other nearly rendering each other catatonic at times, which was titled “Cult” and I surmised could have denoted a kind of cult of femininity and its potential destructiveness.
I knew I was going to see experimental pieces, none of which would be fully formed, and so I didn’t judge them on those grounds. I enjoyed the process of simply sitting in the audience watching, thinking about the movement, the interactions between the dancers, the visuals, the progression of the piece, and arriving at my own conclusions about the meaning of each work, or what I took from it.
Last, in her article Jowitt talks about the artwork on display in the lobby.
Doug and I found it fascinating as well. A video camera surreptitiously set up on the wall near the street records patrons’ images and projects them onto a screen on the opposite wall. Movement of outside passersby triggers this little skeletal figure to begin dancing on the screen. Very amusing to look up at the screen and see this little bouncing skeleton guy “dancing” with you 🙂
On Thursday night, I went to see Ann Liv Young‘s “Snow White” after seeing it posted on The Winger, by Gia Kourlas, who also has a good interview with the young iconoclastic choreographer in TONY. Very in-your-face, very rawly unabashedly unerotically naked, very hilariously WTF??, very post-post-post-feminist, and I LOVED it! This was my first time seeing anything by her, and I had to do some research, both on her work and the classic fairytale, to make a bit of sense (but I love that sort of thing — and I had no idea reinvention of the fairytale was so popular — in addition to Anne Sexton and Gregory Maguire, Angela Carter and A.S. Byatt have had their take). Young said it was based on the Grimm Brothers version and not Disney, which was pretty obvious, but I don’t think she needed to say that anyway: it’s really just her own thing entirely.
I’m not sure if I got what I was supposed to get out of it, or if there’s even some specific thing that she wanted me to get, but some themes I saw were pretense or illusion versus the real, tearing apart sex and gender stereotypes– rather lewdly too, subverting the (male, I guess) gaze, questioning the meaning of eroticism and nakedness versus nudity, etc.. It was kind of like a play within a play, but in a way that questioned what was performance and what was real. When the audience walked into the theater, the three performers were already standing onstage looking out at us waiting for us to take our seats. Young herself kind of glared out at us, a challenging look in her eye: she was not up there to please us, to show us prettiness and gratification. Similarly, at the end of the performance (which was rather abrupt), they just got up, took their things and walked off the stage, not waiting for or needing our applause, no bows, no “curtain calls.” And throughout the show, things would go wrong — sound devices that wouldn’t work, costume malfunctions, problematic props, etc. — and would be fixed onstage. It’s as if she’s questioning what a performance is, what are its confines, and at points, I wasn’t even completely sure if what was happening was supposed to be happening or if it was part of the show.
But back to the beginning. The three performers — one man (Michael Guerrero), two women (Liz Santoro and Young herself) — all wearing simple white ballet leotards and heavy black sneakers (the last of which is the only item of clothing that remains part of the costume throughout), play a rock song — Guerrero on drums, Santoro keyboards and Young singing. Each person, by the way, plays two characters — Guerrero the sound technician and The Queen, Santoro The Woodsman and The Prince, and Young the play’s director and Ms. White. After the song finished, all three stripped naked and changed into their next costume — all onstage. No strip-tease, nothing artful or sexy about it, just a clothing change done onstage — and therefore — really somewhat shocking. Certainly not Kenneth Clarke’s definition of “the nude.” Plus, none of the bodies are “idealized” — no makeup, no starving oneself for months on end or working out like a madperson for the idealized physique — these are real bodies.
For the next song, Young sings naked (except for the heavy black sneakers), while Guerrero works the sound and Santoro changes into her Prince costume — underwear with a giant strap-on dildo. The sound goes wrong, not enough is coming out of the mikes, and Young stops the performance mid-song to yell and scream at everyone for it. One male European blogger I read likened her to Eve Ensler, but to me, this ranting naked woman reminded me more of Karen Finley. Except, where Finley would often rant about overtly political issues, Young’s fist-pounding naked woman is political in another way: if traditional onstage female nudity (ie: for male gratification) must render (at least in fantasy) the woman vulnerable, humiliated, and subjugated to men in order for it to be titillating, Young’s dictating everyone around, forcing even the rather muscular man to run frantically about, his penis dangling between his legs, is nothing but amusing. She is hardly the vulnerable, submissive one, and is humiliating everyone else. Maybe the image is a bit shocking as well; I found it funny.
The Disney version has oft been criticized for reifying the virgin / whore dichotomy. As Sexton’s poem notes, the Queen is the sexed-up slut well deserving of her eventual demise, Snow the glorious good girl who is, for all intents and purposes a virgin — of course every woman must at some point perform those horrid ‘wifely duties’ but Snow’s “china-blue doll eyes … open to say Good Day Mama” but are “shut for the thrust of the unicorn…” Since she denies her sexuality, the fantasy of her virginity remains intact. Here, Young screws all such fantasies: the “Prince,” topless and with her giant strap-on dildo, climbs aboard Young, balancing his body over hers in a push-up, as if looking into the glass-box where the poor dead beautiful Snow lies. But instead of being a beautiful dead girl, Young is alive and active. She jumps up, pushes the Prince over, climbs atop him and straddles the dildo. Young told Kourlas part of what she wished to do was play with skepticism, so she wants the audience to see it penetrate her. The spectacle is rather outlandish and the audience kind of didn’t know how to react. Personally I don’t see how anyone could possibly find this ‘girl-on-girl action’ to be intended for male titilation — it seems way too vulgar — but Young told Kourlas that a European male viewer wrote to her that he thought the performance was quite sexy, but if she wanted to make it yet sexier she should lose the tennis shoes. In an earlier piece, entitled “Michael,” which I only read about and now wished I would have seen, apparently part of the action takes place in a trailer bearing three naked women dancing, and a male outside peering through the window, naked as well, and masturbating. He later comes inside the trailer, only to have his penis tied to the couch by the women, who pour soda over him while screaming, “I don’t love you anymore.” Is she saying that this is the fate that befalls the poor man who assumes women’s bodies exist solely for his gratification? Anyway, at one point during Snow White, Young reads to the audience some letters of criticism from former viewers, but she didn’t include this tennis shoe one and I wish she would have.
In the last section, the three performers pretend to be part of a radio talk show. One discussion revolves around how each character’s Valentine’s Day was spent. Young tells a story in which she was driving down the freeway topless, rocking out to cranked-up music and having herself a great time. A trucker sees her and begins following her. Of course, right then her tire goes flat. She throws a shirt on, jumps out of the car, and goes to the trunk to retrieve her spare, when the trucker stops and approaches her. He shoves her up against her trunk and pulls down his pants. Just then his black lab jumps out of the truck and attacks him, allowing her to run away. She flees into some bushes and hides, only to hear a shotgun go off. After the trucker pulls away, she goes back out to the street and holds the dog in her arms as he dies. A caller phones in and tells her if she’d just keep her clothes on her life would be much easier. Very disturbing, and Finley-esque.
Anyway, “Snow White” is playing at The Kitchen this Wednesday through Saturday. There’s tons of good stuff I left out. My friend, unfortunately, was disturbed by it, so I guess it may not be for everyone, but if you want to see a real spectacle that will likely challenge your notions of things and make you think, then just go and check it out for yourself.
