Palissimo in Pavel Zustiak's "Amidst" Photo: Robert Flynt

Pavel Zustiak’s Amidst, at Baryshnikov Arts Center (BAC) this past weekend, lived up to its name. The performers did indeed move “amidst” the audience, although the dangling modifier is also suggestive of a host of emotions and ideas hovering around the work.

The audience entered BAC’s Howard Gilman Performance Space to a dense fog. No seating, no clear performance area, just musicians set up in a corner, and lots of milling people. Mixing the performers in with the audience trick is an old one, but a good one, and as three (Lindsay Dietz Marchant, Nicholas Bruder, Zustiak) gradually emerged, the audience followed them from one area of the space to the next.

Alternating between intensely theatrical lighting and the dim haze characteristic of pauses that aren’t quite intermissions, Amidst conjured a sense of isolation despite the throngs of people, although there were allusions to fragments of relationships in the moments of interaction between the performers. Projected images on the walls, by photographer Robert Flynn, did little to enhance the work, although the mapping on the floor was a powerful motif. Original music by Christian Frederickson, performed live, contributed ineffably to the atmosphere of intensity.

In terms of performances that eschew the proscenium stage layout, what continually perplexes me is the paradox between an apparent wish to tear down the proverbial fourth wall, countered by the performers’ insistence on living in an internal world and not reacting to an audience within sneezing distance. Zustiak’s physical use of the space seems designed not to delineate between audience/performer, yet those boundaries were still upheld on both sides. Theoretically, there was a possibility of straying from the standard roles, but the audience was a well-mannered crowd, so we stayed in the reactive mode, and distance was kept from the performers. My own movements were a continual, partially successful attempt to see what was going on; as some one who is far from Jolly Green Giant stature, this remains one of my peeves with installation-style performances.

Amidst is the middle section of Zustiak’s The Painted Bird Trilogy, and not having seen the first installment, I had no reference point. But the full trilogy is scheduled to be performed at LaMaMa next spring (2012). This is a rarity for mid-level artists and smaller presenting venues, so keep an eye out.

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(via Animal NY) – Next month, director Antoine Viviani is streaming a new documentary about “intervention artists” called In Situ. Filmed mostly in Europe, it would appear, the film explores how artists can invade the urban space to create a transformative artistic experience. Aside from that rather bland description, I unfortunately don’t know much, but visit the film’s website to sign up for email information about its multi-platform (whatever that means) launch next month.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Ellis Wood will be performing her evening-length solo “Mom” at NYU/Tisch this Friday at 7:30. I’ve known Ellis since we both performed solos for DTW’s Fresh Tracks back in 1995 and have seen early versions of this solo, which won last year’s DanceNow (NYC) Challenge. We spoke last month prior to (and then, just following) a performance of the work at Symphony Space.

Thanks for rescheduling due to my field trip chaperone duty conflict. I appreciated your comment about how it was appropriate to the subject matter, after all.

It was funny. A writer from the New Yorker was coming to rehearsal and called saying he’d lost childcare and was hoping he could bring his 5 month-old given the nature of my show.

It’s hard to do get things done with kids. I know that is just one aspect of “Mom”-ness, but the logistical, energy reserve, physical tolls are substantial. You can’t really know the full weight until you are in it. I often feel that the idolization of young, new voices (and bodies) in dance can create a focus in our field that ignores the realities for maturing artists – family responsibilities, aging, health care, etc. I remember the days of your Gender Project. Things felt very urgent and frustrating then. I now wonder whether things are truly different or if I simply am. Is it any easier to ‘make it’ in dance as a female artist or have we just altered our priorities enough that those other issues are still present, but mean less now?

Everything you are saying, I feel like I’m saying every day. You mentioned The Gender Project, I feel like in those days I fought a lot harder. Now, my energy is spent elsewhere – even though I notice what you are saying. I don’t fight through it. It has been different, to be in the dance world not fighting. I’m more interested in accepting what is and making my own path through, so that I feel fulfilled and happy and comfortable with what I’m able to put out there. This piece is not the biggest production that I’ve ever put on. Looking at it from the outside it seems not big in scale, but I’ve never been so nervous, insecure, proud and excited all at the same time. And, I can kind of remember this feeling from that first solo I did on that Fresh Tracks we were both in – in 1995. I remember needing the shift from dancing in other people’s companies to making my own way. I had this feeling of total rawness – and I feel that again 15/16 years later. I think finding Fran Kirmser, a development director I started working with 4/5 years ago, helped me shift to this moment. I felt lost in the dance world about what my next step was. She guided me toward finding what makes me happy. It keeps me honest. Well I’m certainly not going to do it if I’m miserable and just doing what other people think I should be doing. If this piece weren’t called “MOM” I wouldn’t have made it through. I can’t tell you how many times I couldn’t go to a rehearsal, with space paid for. I had one 6-week stretch where some kid in my family was sick and I couldn’t rehearse. And, the only way I could go back in was to say: “hey, this is what it means to be a mom.” I used to rehearse everyday for 4 hours a day. I used to be in a certain kind of shape and didn’t have 3 c-sections. I used to hold myself to such rules and I can’t do that any more. When I started back after my third child, if I went to rehearsal and created something new and my body didn’t hurt – it was such victory. I can’t believe I put this thing together. Anyone without a child knows getting a work up is a huge accomplishment and anyone who can do it with a child is amazing.

And, to do an evening-length solo that you told me (after performing part of it at the Fresh Tracks Gala at DTW) could only be done in a one-off situation.

I’ve actually built up to it be something I could do as a 2 or 3 night performance run. But, the build has been so slow. After my last kid (who is 2.5), it was difficult to do a second position plie. It’s taken me 2.5 years to be able to feel like I can do this piece and get through and not hurt myself and do it a few times in a row. I didn’t think I could pull myself together to do a solo. Funny enough it was my mom and Fran who were actually the ones saying: “Well, you could.” And I said no and that went on for a long time before they started to point out that I already was. A couple years ago I went back onstage and it was hard and it was a slow build. Then Robin Staff at DanceNow sent me that application for the Fall Festival and I thought, “I’m just going to do this!” It got me back and I am forever grateful. I needed something somewhere to make me do it. And, it felt so good. DTW was where I did my first solo.

I love that you came back with a solo called “MOM” and that it won DanceNow’s challenge.  That seemed like a validating moment, saying maybe we are growing up and maybe opening to realities that valuable working artists can also be active parents. It seems to me that you are fighting by example now. It reminds me of a central theme in Joan Acocella’s “28 Artists and 2 Saints” book. How she said that female artists experience significant gaps or ends to their creative lives because the domestic burdens of caring for other human beings (young or old) fell most often on them. I don’t think that has changed that substantially, but I’d like to think more of us are managing to maintain both rich personal and creative lives.

Sometimes there’s that gap and sometimes there’s a departure. There’s a certain kind of push that I don’t want to do have anything to do with, the push from ten years ago. That’s kind of what Fran guided me away from, and why I did this piece. The reality is that my kids have to go to school and eat and considerations include finances, time, energy, how do I split my life and all those things. I do the bulk of scheduling and doctor’s and dentists and I have to be available if somebody’s sick and how does dance work around this. I had these two incredible women who were mothers who gave me a vote of confidence and I needed that. Also, the video artist Robyn Tomlin, who is a single mother, stepped in – and the project really started coming together. I’d love to say that I was all confident moving forward, but I needed some votes of confidence. My mother, pregnant 5 times in 4 years and losing 2 of them while dancing with Martha Graham, knew what she was talking about too. While in the middle of dancing in Martha’s company, she suffered all those changes to her body. God knows that was insanely difficult, but Martha was always clear that she could come back after having the kids.

So, how does this all make its way into the work? Or does it?

It’s about 45 minutes and there are different sections and each represents a different time and vibe in a mother’s life. There are two sections that are the most intense or poignant for me. About half way in, there is a section with an elastic band. Most everything before that leads up to getting pregnant. The band represents an umbilical cord and most everything after represents life after kids. What I do during that section is intricate enough that it’s all I can concentrate on – which is different from my usual looking out at the audience and playing with expressivity. It’s all I can do to get through this section and it feels very real. Sometimes you’re doing the world out there and it’s crazy and then there are moments – pregnant, giving birth, with the kids – where you’re tangled and caught and also maneuvering through it with great intricacy and I know this is Freudian but I’m really attached to this section. Also the last section is special to me because it is the first one I made.

How did the piece go? What was it like to perform this work?

Better than I had imagined. Doing it just made me want to do it more. Something about doing it for the first time meant that I could live in it in a very real way. I couldn’t fake much because it was so raw – I felt like I was living in the moment. My kids, husband and my sister and my own mom were there and I love that. Dancing is a place where I can actually be something other than a wife and mother at this point– so it means a lot to me for them to see that part of me as well. There are certain things – even about motherhood – that I only express on stage. How funny that a stage seems like such a safe place for me to express some things I don’t quite know how to express in my life.  Anyway, I am going to keep working on the piece and will continue to do it for a while. Thanks for asking.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last year, Culturebot dutifully trotted off to Portland to visit family and catch nearly the entire run of the two-week Time-Based Art (TB:A) Festival run by the Portland Institute for Contemporary Arts. It was an incredible experience, with a great late-night performance space and bar in a converted high school (a very Portland sorta thing), with amazing shows by the likes of Jerome Bel, Radoslaw Rychcik, and more.

Well, this year’s line-up is mostly trickled out, even if all the details aren’t yet on their website. New York is (predictably) well represented with the likes of Andrew Dinwiddie (with his Jimmy Swaggart show), Taylor Mac with Comparison is Violence, and Kyle Abraham, who’s taking both The Radio Show as well as presenting a viewing of his WIP Live! The Realest MC. Monologist Mike Daisey is back again with his latest, an ambitious 24-hour-long solo performance (to be performed only once); looks like Nature Theater of Oklahoma needs to hurry up with the rest of Life and Times before the idea’s stale.

Otherwise, there are three shows that I would definitely put into the can’t-miss category: Portland’s tEEth Performance are presenting their last work, Home Made, which recently played Fusebox in Austin (see here for my former intern’s interview with the company). I can’t say enough good things about tEEth–Angelle Hebert is a choreographer whose work demonstrates a subtle and complex understanding of the human body, and there’s a profound dignity to the work she presents with her husband, composer Phillip Kraft.

Then there’s zoe | juniper, the company led by choreographer/dancer Zoe Scofield and artist/designer Juniper Shuey. Similar to Crystal Pite, Scofield (who, full disclosure, I know and like and respect) makes movement that’s extremely technically complex, distilling or maybe even deconstructing balletic and classical dance into a physically compelling contemporary form, which occurs in a visually stunning atmosphere provided by her collaborator Shuey. A Crack in Everything, her newest, has its debut shortly at Jacob’s Pillow before beginning a two-year tour that takes it to Portland, her hometown of Seattle, and beyond.

And lastly, there’s Austin’s Rude Mechs with The Method Gun. I’m not even going to bother describing it–I’ve gushed plenty before, so check the record–other than to say that if you have the chance to see this piece of theater, don’t miss it. This is the sort of show that gets poor dumb kids hooked on theater in the first place, and the sort that embittered, desensitized critics like me are always jonesing for, those all-too-rare kids of energy that really remind you why you’re in this game in the first place.

Also worth noting is the fact that, if I’m not mistaken, this is the last TBA Fest with Cathy Edwards at the helm (see our interview with her here). In the cloistered little world of contemporary performance, where gigs as a curator are few and far between in North America (there’s less than 20, I think), everyone’s been all atwitter with gossip over who’s going to be taking over for Edwards and under what circumstances. Again, if I’m not mistaken, PICA seems to finally be interested in having a full-time, permanent curator, rather than the current revolving door of three-year contracts. I know of a couple people in the running, and I have no idea when the announcement will be made, but it’s overall worth noting: whoever takes that job will be assuming a transformational role in the commissioning/touring circuit in North America, and all the artists who want those opportunities (particularly the ones who feel currently excluded or neglected) will be very interested to see who assumes the helm.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Susan Marshall & Company celebrated its 25th anniversary last weekend with a pair of works using both performance spaces at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. The company is at New Haven’s Festival of Arts and Ideas (curated by Cathy Edwards) with versions of both works opening tomorrow and running through Saturday.

On opening night at BAC, Frame Dances was a live-feed video and movement installation performed in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at 7pm and Adamantine, a 2009 concert dance work, followed in the Jerome Robbins Theater at 8. Both works were originally commissioned by Peak Performances @ Montclair. The 2008 Frame Dances, with video design and projections by Ryan Holsapple and Roderick Murray, builds upon a charming section from Marshall’s Bessie-winning 2006 Cloudless. The video (without a live-performance-feed) of that work began the evening, priming the audience for the ensuing material -  images of bodies negotiating confined space, set to evocative music selections by the delightful Peter Whitehead, before Sandstone, a dirty duet for Joseph Poulson and Kristin Hollinsworth performed live in a sandbox frame, presented them with the dueling realities of process and product. The pristine detachment of the mediated images do not reflect the messy, human labor and effort involved in generating them. The videos define a single perspective and offer no peripheral information. When a dancer is out of the frame, they are absent – visually and artistically; however, for the various audience members encircling the live performers for Sandstone and its companions Green Green Grass and Forward, the dancers outside the box provide a very animated, ontological element. We can still see them there, standing just outside the camera’s purview. Their existence – being “one who is just about to enter” or “one who has just left” – provides the audience with a constant presence that isn’t weighted as heavily in the resulting images. Their proximity offers the dirty, giggly, sweaty truth behind the slick images. Green Green Grass, in particular, is a chaotic circus on the outside, full of a large, multi-generational group of players continually changing Mary Kokie McNaughter’s costumes. The constant rush of off-camera quick-changes, the negotiation of one young boy’s shift out of his wheelchair, through the frame and back into his wheelchair, and the rapid pulling and piling of the in-frame choreography make a playful performance work and the working of the convention of performance into play. There outside the edges, we see a kind of barn-raising communal effort of shared responsibility and care. The resulting video is so tightly executed and glossy that it seems ripe for a color copier ad that fleetingly hints at those values while in pursuit of an assembly line of bodies. In fact, I’m surprised it wasn’t ripped off in the time it takes to say Improv Everywhere versus T-Mobile.

Adamantine is a multimedia work featuring live music by Peter Whitehead (with Elton Bradman), sound design by Jane Shaw, costumes by Olivera Gajic, and shadowy projections courtesy of Mark Stanley. Her company of impressive dancers Kristen Hollinsworth, Luke Miller, Joseph Poulson, Petra van Noort, and Darrin Wright with newest member Ildiko Toth put forth an impressive effort, but Adamantine notably lacks the kind of luster or edge that its title promises. The work definitely hammers away at the viewer with repeated images and an often pounding industrial score, but lacks in the ethereal wonder of Cloudless, the raucous intimacy of Sawdust Palace, and in general, the signature wit of a widely acclaimed artist (other than Whitehead’s charming on-stage moments) whose investigations seem stunted here. The work was developed during a residency in Montclair’s Alexander Kasser Theater, and in keeping with Marshall’s process includes sequences inspired by items the company found in the space. However, it’s hard to call Marshall a found object artist, too many of the material items being played with don’t accumulate beyond moments of gimmickry into a cohesive idea. And, other than Hollinsworth’s luscious swaying moments standing over an underlit floor fan or steaming under a low-hung lamp with Miller, there are few opportunities to enjoy her company as the fascinating individuals they are. For a work touted as in intersection of dance, sound design, visual art, and theater, Adamantine feels like standard concert dance fare.

Popularity: 3% [?]

The Edinburgh Fringe Fest‘s catalogue came out last week, and amidst its hundreds of pages of cabaret, comedy, dance, and theater that runs the gamut from ridiculously amateur to best-forgotten to instant-classic, there are more than a few companies and artists well familiar to Culturebot’s regular readers. Irish Modern Dance Theater, Belarus Free Theater, and Belgium’s Ontroerend Goed will all be there, along with playwright Tim Crouch’s newest I, Malvolio, as well as Banana Bag and Bodice‘s much-loved Beowulf, and The TEAM‘s long-awaited Mission Drift.

Popularity: 9% [?]

From Jessica Jobaris's (center) piece at NWNW

I may live in NYC now, but I have a special place in my heart for Seattle’s contemporary performance community, where I learned the ropes, and in particular for the NW New Works Festival at On the Boards. A two-week festival of new dance, theater, and music, from Seattle and the larger Pacific NW’s performance community, NWNW is one of OtB’s oldest and most beloved programs. The vast majority of new experimental work coming out of the region is first seen in 20-minute form at the festival; what audiences see from 16 companies over two weeks will be filling out the next couple years’ seasons of original, challenging work. I sat on the festival selection panel for the 2010 fest (an awesome and humbling experience), and this is the first time in five or six years I won’t be there for it. The trailer only does it partial justice, so check the OtB blog for reviews and more info. Also, for all the Portland readers we (hopefully) have, some of the artists, like Jessica Jobaris, will be headed south to Portlandia two weeks from now for Risk/Reward, the local performance festival produced by our good pals Hand2Mouth Theater, who understand that the key to healthy arts in a city is building institutions to showcase and support the diversity of work happening there, so please, support their efforts.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Last night I saw the last in my series of shows at Festival Transamériques, in Montreal. Tempest: Without a Body from Lemi Ponifasio and the Auckland-based group Mau continues tonight only, marking the end of an amazing festival.

How does one begin to discuss difficult artwork? It is easy to write off terrible work as “challenging” and vice versa. Tempest: Without a Body is a challenging piece of dance theatre and I think it must be so for the performers as well as the audience. I found it very difficult to watch, but it resonated with me and the concept and images continue to grow and expand in my head.

Almost every article or review I looked at (and, out of curiosity, I looked at several) dwelled on the piece as a meditation on “a post 9/11 world.” While this is indeed used in the press of the performance, I feel it is being misinterpreted or rather appropriated, highlighting 9/11 as the sole theme of the performance. And while post 9/11 power and fear certainly inform the environment of the piece, the content is built on other sources. In the short program interview, Lemi Ponifasio cites Walter Benjamin’s “Angel of History” and Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus as primary influences.

…the tempest from Paradise that has frozen the Angel of History who wanted to save us from destruction. – Interview with Lemi Ponifasio, FTA

Though he abandoned the text, traces of Shakespeare’s The Tempest are still visible in the piece as are themes of Maori rights and Western oppression.

Plunged suddenly into darkness when the lights go down, the audience is hit with a wall of sound. Everyone around me jumped, literally, an inch in their seats. Shaken in this way within the first seconds, it is impossible to ever settle into the performance – an effect that was undoubtedly intentional. The assault of sound continues throughout the piece, rising and falling in waves and subtly changing in quality but almost always present. It is a white noise, a mechanic noise but through it rise strains of song and glimpses of purer tones. On occasion the dancers begin to sing and their voices are very welcome instances humanity against the wall of sound.

Tempest: Without a Body. Photo: Lemi Ponifasio

The Angel of History, seeming also the embodiment of Shakespeare’s Ariel, enters early in the piece. The only female performer in the ensemble of ten, the angel is small and hunched, wings too small to fly. She peers at the audience with eyes so intense that her pain is visible even to the back of the theatre. And then she screams. This screech of anguish made us, the already tender audience, jump again in our seats. And again. And again. Somehow, even though we all knew it was coming, the vocalization of her terror never ceased to shake.

The rhythm of Tempest: Without a Body is intensely slow. The stage is kept very dark, so much so that performers and objects are able to appear and disappear almost magically. I kept missing where and when people and things appeared – they were just suddenly there, as if out of nowhere. An ensemble of robed men flow throughout the entire piece, moving with steps so small, even, and quick that they seem to roll along like machines. Their movements are highly ritualized and repetitive. The angel and the robed men are returning characters. Amidst them appear other beings, some human and concretely real and others more mystical and undefinable. A man (or creature) walking on feet and fists paces around a cell defined by white light – Caliban-like in his looks and movement, treated like an animal by some invisible power. A man shining with silver shakes and writhes on a black table. A man in a full business suit gives an angry speech in Maori.

The images of the piece are striking, violent and cold but beautiful and grand in scale. Because of the stillness, each image was burned into my head. A huge metallic backdrop hangs off-center, casting an oppressive and heavy square shadow. At one point the angel lifts her hand and it is covered with wet blood (I still have no idea how that happened); slowly the backdrop turns red, liquid colour oozing across its surface.

Of the six productions I’ve seen at the FTA in the last two weeks, Tempest: Without a Body was by far the most challenging. But, more than any other piece, the themes and images nestled into my head, demanding to be further processed and thought over. I think that is one of the differences between difficult work and terrible work: terrible work is borne and discarded, difficult work may be demanding but is ultimately rewarding, both emotionally and intellectually.

Popularity: 3% [?]

Dance Theater Workshop presented Yanira Castro/a canary torsi at the Brooklyn Botanical Gardens last week in her beautiful and mysterious Paradis. The first site-specific dance project in the Garden’s 100-year history, Paradis made poetic use of the acclaimed Cherry Esplanade for an edenic nocturnal visit.

Peggy Cheng in "Paradis" Photo by Charles Houghton

It began with a group of dancers (in angelic white tunics and tennis shoes) slowly approaching from across a great expanse and ended with giddy audience members singing as they strolled back through the darkened garden, after being treated to luscious counter-balanced couplings. Inspired by the final section of Jean-Luc Godard’s 2004 film, Notre Musique, (the film’s final scene shares the same name as this performance work’s title and several key images), Paradis continues Castro’s examination of the boundaries of performance, as well as those between participant and observer. However, unlike the installations for Center of Sleep and Wilderness, not to mention the highly intimate bathroom performances Dark Horse/Black Forest, Paradis allows the epic natural grandeur of the Botanical Garden’s Esplanade to provide the audience with plenty of breathing room. The interactions with the dancers, who danced among us common folk, were fleeting and gentle, and the management of group (audience) movement was specifically crafted while sharing a kind of organic, spring-outing sense of wanderlust and after-hours mischief.

Castro mentions Philip Auslander’s book Liveness in her program notes (received after the performance) stating that his description of a generation coming of age “where live experience of any kind is undesirable and actually distressing” was exhilarating for her. As she writes:

Performance is distressing. Even it its most “traditional forms, people come together to experience a ritual that may or not play by the current cultural “rules”: whether you will have seat, whether there is space between you and the performer, whether you have to stand up, are asked to do something, suspend disbelief, throw a tomato, clap. You don’t know what will happen. The performers don’t really know either. This is the space ripe with tension: You (the audience) are here. We (the performers) are here. “Unnervingly organic.”

Paradis frames distance: intimacy. I am standing next to you. I don’t know you. I recognize myself. You are distant.

Peggy Cheng, Luke Miller, and Shayla Vie Jenkins Photo by Yi-Chun Wu

I include Castro’s notes because I think that what she is/has been playing with, and what Dean Moss recently offered so eloquently in his Nameless forest, at The Kitchen a couple weeks ago, reveal some of the key investigations for our form at this moment in history. This question of the audience vs performer isn’t new, but feels ripe again lately (and by lately, I do mean in the last several years). I recently included Auslander in my “Ruminations on the Body Madness Platform at Danspace Project” because that Platform also offered several examples of what is alive right now in Live art. But, the calculated chaos of that Madness, the calm arrangement of Castro’s work, and the considered sophistication of Moss’s works reveal how wide the field’s reach is in considering what the nature of live performance is today. There are many examples of how the resistance against familiar notions of concert dance are being used to unsettle some audience members by separating the work apart from the generally harmless spectacle that dance often offers while physically bridging the gap between viewer and participant. As some audience members become unsettled and agitated, the informality, closeness and disruption can increase the potential for sympathetic alignment with the dancers, or as in the case of Miguel Gutierrez’s DEEP Aerobics (part of the Body Madness platform) become part of the huge writhing mass that following a single guru’s guidance. In that work resides an actual, physical, sweaty, experience. In Moss’s Nameless forest several selected audience members become actively engaged in the works unfolding; they don’t necessarily change the direction of the work and are moved and placed by the company, but their presence becomes essential to the remaining (seated) audience’s experience of the work, and our witnessing of their experience becomes essential to our enjoyment of it as well. There is a sympathetic alignment that allows them to serve as our avatars in a very precarious, exploded landscape. That there are no bows at the end of these works speaks to how the artists are thinking about the value of internal process for the active participants over the produced effect, or resulting approval. They become part of a shared experience, and we sympathetically do as well.

Auslander challenges this notion of live performance’s value as one of shared experience as flawed. For him, live performance does not create community because “performance is founded on difference, on separation and fragmentation, not unity.” That while it “places us in the living presence of the performers, other human beings with whom we desire unity and can imagine achieving it, because they are there, in front of us,” our desire will inevitably be frustrated by the impenetrable breach between performer and spectator that live performance reinforces.

Castro and Moss both lengthen their reach into that breach by requiring audience members inside their work, especially Moss for whom substantial portions of his work would not exist without those from the audience who joined the dancers on the stage. For Castro however, the audience, though noted to have influenced the resulting piano score, played live by Michael Dauphinais, seemed no more integral to the work itself beyond providing it with witnesses, albeit very closely situated witnesses. I don’t fault her the intention for a deeper engagement, and found the site-specific nature of the work itself provided the audience with its corporeal experience, very different from the stasis of the theater, but the level of interactivity she seems in search of is hard to reach when several other agendas that require, primarily, passive viewership hold sway.

The Viewer completes the work of art. – Marcel Duchamp

Artist and scholar Ann Cooper Albright treats the contagious, visceral nature of watching dance as evidence for the argument that dance viewer-ship is an experiential process that elicits the sympathetic, physical response I mention above: “Perceiving dance means more than a flat visual gaze, it also means attending to kinesthetic, aural, somatic, and spatial sensations.” She draws from America’s first dance critic John Martin’s concept of “metakinesis”—wherein movement is the medium for “transference of an aesthetic and emotional concept from the unconscious of one individual to that of another.” I could argue that metakinesis makes any dance viewing situation an interactive one and especially in Paradis, where our senses are being fed by the open air, the distant sounds of the city, the closer sounds of an amplified grand piano sitting among the cherry trees, the dancer who passes you in close proximity and looks directly in your eyes, etc.  In some way, there has been a transformative relationship, but this form of interaction is merely a mental act on my part.

Again, our presence did not necessarily change the direction of the work.  In his online 2003 essay “Dance and Interactivity,” Johannes Birringer defines interaction “as a spatial and architectural concept for performance”–wherein the emphasis gets transferred away from the dancer’s somatic awareness to their increased level of responsiveness to a shifting landscape. True responsiveness to a shifting landscape seems to beg for stronger improvisational foundation. These are not works that are truly ‘different each night based on the audience,’ they are not the kind of collective creations that Julian Beck and Judith Malina championed in their own version of paradise in the 60s. The Living Theatre’s Paradise Now, a  semi-improvisational theater work dependent on activating the audience that would run several hours beginning with “The Rite of Guerrilla Theatre” (with actors approaching the audience and speaking directly to them while building to a pitching scream with the phrases: “I am not allowed to travel without a passport”; “I don’t know how to stop the wars”; “You can’t live without money”; “I’m not allowed to smoke marijuana”; “I am not allowed to take my clothes off”) moving through “The Rite of Universal Intercourse” and ending in “The Rite of I and Thou,” with actors carrying audience to the streets in search of Paradise reciting, “The theatre is in the street. The street belongs to the people. Free the theatre. Free the street. Begin.” And then, generally, being promptly arrested for indecent exposure.

For Julian Beck, collective creation was a political act. It was “the secret weapon of the people…This play is a voyage from the many to the one and from the one to the many. It’s a spiritual voyage and a political voyage, a voyage for the actors and the spectators. The play is a vertical ascent toward permanent revolution, leading to revolutionary action here and now. The revolution of which the play speaks is the beautiful, non-violent, anarchist revolution. The purpose of the play is to lead to a state of being in which non-violent revolutionary action is possible.”

Clearly, that was then. A reach for interactivity and engagement of the audience with the purpose of activating political consciousness and tearing apart the structures of traditional theater was alive and vital. Gutierrez’s “Death Electric Emo Protest Aerobics” could be the Living Theatre of today (because unfortunately, the Living Theatre are not), but within the safer, contemporary confines of live performance. It activates the entire audience (unless you prefer to lurk at the wall) into behavior that is rigorous, ridiculous and repetitive, while asking you to consider some of the global disgraces and tragedies you are willingly complicit in. Many of today’s activations of the audience are fed less by the political and artistic urgencies of the past, and executed more as an aesthetic and intellectual tool. Moss and Castro have engaged interactivity not towards its own end, nor, finally, towards a closer meeting or actual union of humans, but instead as a means to an end. Though the different works provided certain audience members with particularly intimate relationships to the performers, and to the work, the varying amounts of audience activation utilized are parts of a more complex toolbox serving very specific aesthetic inquiries.

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By Jeremy Finch

I saw the Brooklyn-based LAVA Company perform their most recent acrobatics/theater/dance creation encyclopedia at The Flea Theater (through Sunday, June 12; tickets $20) on Thursday, June 9. I’d been to their space a few times to take a class and I read the company’s prominent profile last week in the Wall Street Journal, so I figured I should check it out. I’m not quite sure how to categorize encyclopedia as a piece (I wouldn’t really call it dance or theater), but I left The Flea feeling impressed with what I’d seen. The eight performers–a funky and inviting all-female acrobatics troupe–couldn’t help but share their infectious enthusiasm for movement and play, and the audience was enthused and appreciative for the full 60 minutes.

The evening was composed of seven or eight short vignettes, ranging from static trapeze and hoop diving to live music and (an excellent and memorable) acro-adagio. While the performers didn’t quite seem to have high-level circus training (Molly Chanoff was probably the most engaging), they executed their skills well and obviously had deep trust for one another. They used music (both recorded and performed live) to their benefit and wisely drew on choreographic tools like repetition to truly showcase the effort exerted at each moment.

At first, I was a bit confused by the opening act (hoop-diving) because it was all done in the dark. I later realized (after rereading the WSJ article) that it was because it was performed topless. Ultimately, that piece was all lost on me because I could barely see the movements, let alone their bodies. I was confused by the obvious lack of lighting and I could just see moving shapes and hear the crash of bodies hitting the floor.

In terms of title, I figured that “encyclopedia” must have referred partly to the set design (a giant stack of dusty tomes occupied the rear of the stage), but it also seemed to refer to the shared mix of physical training and interests that each performer brought to the group. The program notes contained a particular assortment of entries and definitions, from warrior “Amazons” to “Lava”, but also “Jill Johnston” and “Rainbow”. While it wasn’t overly explicit in the different vignettes, there was a clear feminist undercurrent to the evening, which often emerged through the music choices (“You Don’t Own Me” stuck with me in particular).

To me, the presence of such strong, gutsy female performers raised two responses. First, it made me think of comparisons with Elizabeth Streb’s company, and the ways in which STREB and LAVA, while similar in genre, are fundamentally different from each other. While Streb’s choreography seeks to distill pure action and physics, it seems to ultimately strip away all sense of humanness and personal identity from her performers. In LAVA’s case, the performers felt like fully-formed individuals and they looked like they were actually having fun doing what they were doing. They looked physically different from each other, clearly had individual areas of expertise and allowed bits of their personalities to come through via their faces, voices and choreography. While I see Streb’s work as subversive and feminist in the way that it asks her male and female performers to blindly take equal physical risks, I liked how LAVA acknowledged the power of having an all female cast and explicitly embraced the different ways in which it might be interpreted. That’s not to say that LAVA’s approach is qualitatively better or “more feminist”, but I just found that it engaged me on a more human level. How can one not acknowledge the uniqueness of this sort of work? How many other all-female acro groups out there can you name?

Second, encyclopedia, made me think about the ways in which traditional circus stuff is so deeply skewed towards stereotypical heterosexual, male/female dynamics. There’s nothing worse, in my opinion, than seeing elite circus performers perform mind-blowing physical feats and then arbitrarily try to act out a gratuitous heterosexual love story or an overblown macho fight sequence. But because that sort of male-centered convention is so common, there’s a element in watching LAVA that feels novel and kind of strange.

Ultimately, while I’ve written a lot so far about gender and circus, it wouldn’t be fair of me to frame encyclopedia as simply a “female acro production”. encyclopedia is a great show, in and of itself. Full stop. LAVA’s an interesting and original company, and their studio is a neighborhood staple in Park Slope for those who attend the classes often. I’m glad I went to The Flea to see the show: It impressed me and made me think, even after I left. I think that’s a pretty good sign of original art.

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