Photo by Marie-Francoise Plissart

Going into Thierry Smits’/Compagnie Thor‘s To the Ones I Love (at BAM, through Oct. 1), I have to admit that I was least interested to see whether the piece would veer into the dangerously racially insensitive territory I feared it might. Here, for instance, is the company’s own description (keep in mind they’re based in Belgium, English not necessarily being the first language of the translator):

In To the Ones I Love, Thierry Smits puts nine dancers of African descent on the stage.  More precisely, for this choice is a vital one, he uses nine dancers whose complexions hark back to Africa.

Thierry Smits’s message is not political, however.  It deliberately sets out to be aesthetic and refuses all concessions to exoticism.  The principle is to set bodies used to “Western” choreographic techniques but nevertheless shaped by other traditions and dances in motion.  They dance in a white decor and are literally transported by Johan Sebastian Bach’s music, by its overflowing generosity and immense virtuosity.  The challenge is obviously to manage the unexpected outcomes of the meeting of different cultural references.

Mind you, I didn’t read this till it came time to preview the show, and reading it, I was left dubious. To say the least, using people for their “complexion” is risky territory, because of course it objectifies racial characteristics. Which the To the Ones I Love does, in fact, do. In the first full company sequence following the solo-based opening, we’re given the company of nine (mostly black, with a few lighter-complexioned artists mixed in) male dancers, shirtless, seated on rectagular blocks with their backs to the audience. For several minutes, we’re granted a pornographic look at the dancers’ (muscular, ever-so-slightly gleaming with a sheen of sweat) bodies as the company cycles through a series of fluid, abstract, mainly upper-body movements.

And I don’t use “pornographic” lightly, though it risks over-stating it a bit: think mainstream, Playboy (or -girl, in this case) porn, rather than the freaky online stuff. The images are only putatively erotic, due to the actual exposure of flesh; in practice, though, they’re flat, objectifying, but so blatant in drawing the gaze and so lacking in charged content that they can’t be called “erotic” anymore than a table or chair can be said to be “erotic.”

It’s treating a person like a thing.

So yes, there was a moment where I was waiting to see where this would go, because within the context of the piece, the choreographer, Thierry Smits, has in fact chosen to showcase black flesh in a purely aesthetic fashion. We won’t even have a misguided attempt at multiculturalism in this piece. Rather, it’s the “African” (scarequotes due to the fact that these artists are not, apparently, actually African, but rather of “African descent”) as object, to provide a (literal) visual contrast against the whiteness of the space. But then it went…well, nowhere.

To the Ones I Love is a great example of what–for lack of a better term, I guess–I like to call “dance-y dance.” Not just explicitly technique-based work, even work that slips into the solely academic-technique category, but rather work which has little or no interest in anything beyond itself. It’s dancing for the sake of giving you something pretty and exceptional to look at. And general insensitivity aside, I honestly can’t make more of Smits’ racial choices than he wants me to because it’s such a skin-deep piece (pun intended). It takes nearly 15 minutes before any of the performers have any meaningful physical contact with one another, and once they do, the human touch is rendered completely desexualized and desensualized. The nine very fit, adult, and it need be said, highly accomplished, male dancers interact with one another as innocently as children at play. Description quoted above aside, I saw no hint that Smits was interested in these dancers’ ethnic backgrounds at all, aside from a vague desire to see them incorporated into the visual schema. Which, furthermore, by the second or third switch between primary color-themed t-shirts (blue, yellow, red, green), was about as deep and engaging as a United Colors of Benneton ad from the Nineties.

In other words, it is in fact a completely abstract movement work. Which is not exactly my cup of tea, leaving me a bit uncomfortable with the negative feelings I have towards it. Maybe it’s just taste, right? But even so, I also like pretty and/or sexy people (of either gender) doing pretty things because people like to see pretty things. I like fun. But I found the work boring. Once–just one time in a slightly over hour-long piece–I saw the members of the company drop posture for a short phrase (very near the end) in a way that really stepped outside what I take to be a very obvious comfort zone, opening a whole world of possibilities. Otherwise, I really felt that To the Ones I Love was an uninspired and very shallow piece of dance.

Really, it was only during the solos that I had any sort of thrill in the piece. One or two of the dancers had a real evocative capacity, and it was in those moments that I most sensed the joy in movement that Smits stated was his purpose. But otherwise I was left generally bored. Perhaps it’s a bias on my part, but I tend to be more attracted to choreography that treats human beings like human beings, rather than manipulable stage objects, to be moved hither and thither in vaguely interesting formations. Which, again, is not to deny the accomplishment of the dancers, most of whom were very talented. Nor is it entirely to discount the idea that dance can’t just be something cool to look at. But this piece was too shallow and lacking in any sort of “wow” factor to get away with what it seemed to want to do.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Culturebot loves PRELUDE! Yes, okay, I curated for three years, but I loved it even before that. Created by the indefatigable and inspiring Frank Hentschker, PRELUDE has established itself as the best way to see new work from all your favorite emerging and established NYC-based artists. This year PRELUDE.11 takes as its starting point the dialogue between recent tendencies in theater, dance and visual art performance. For the first time in PRELUDE’s history, it will use the James Gallery at the Graduate Center as well as the Martin E. Segal Theatre Center so that this interdisciplinary festival can continue to investigate the resonances between the “white cube” and the “black box.” Invitees include Jay Scheib, Temporary Distortion, Sibyl Kempson and Big Dance Theater, Donelle Woolford, Jackie Sibblies Drury, Mac Wellman, Suzanne Bocanegra and Paul Lazar, Half Straddle, Daniel Fish, lumberob, Jake Hooker, Otso Huopaniemi, Elevator Repair Service, Young Jean Lee, Rob Fitterman, Will Holder, Nina Beier, and a host of others, including a new commission from Jackson Pollock Bar. Events occur daily from 4pm-10pm, with selected performances loosely based around the following themes:

· We Present A Presentation: performative lectures, theory-installations, and performances within performances.
· Repurposing: taking preexisting works, events or texts as the basis for new performances
· Text As Texture: creating a musical or performative experience from the materiality of language.

THIS IS GOING TO BE AWESOME!!! DON’T MISS IT!!!

PRELUDE.11
The Eighth Annual PRELUDE Festival

Wednesday Oct 12 – Friday, Oct 14, 2011
FREE and open to the public. First come, first served.
The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at The Graduate Center, CUNY.
365 Fifth Avenue (at 34th Street) NYC
WWW.PRELUDENYC.ORG

The Martin E. Segal Theatre Center at the Graduate Center, CUNY is pleased to present PRELUDE.11, the eighth annual PRELUDE festival dedicated to artists at the forefront of contemporary New York City theatre, dance and visual art performance. PRELUDE will offer over 20 short performances, readings, and open rehearsals—a completely free sneak-peek into the work being prepared for the 2011/12 season, as well as new commissions and daily panel discussions with artists and performers.

PRELUDE is the annual three-day festival organized by the Martin E. Segal Theater Center at CUNY Graduate Center. It was established in 2003 with the remit of showing the best in New York-based theater and performance. Each year Frank Hentschker, director of the Martin E.Segal Theater Center, assembles a curatorial team to select and organize the program. This year’s PRELUDE has been selected by Claire Bishop (Associate Professor, PhD Program in Art History, CUNY Graduate Center), Rob Marcato (Artistic Line Producer, Signature Theatre Company, NY) and Helen Shaw (Theater critic, Time Out New York). PRELUDE.11’s Producer is Caleb Hammons (Producer, Soho Rep., NY).

All presentations will be held in the James Gallery and the Segal Center at CUNY Graduate Center, 365 Fifth Avenue at 34th Street. A closing night party will be held on Friday 14 October at The Gershwin Hotel, 7 East 27th Street between Fifth and Madison Avenues. All programs are subject to change.

Popularity: 4% [?]

New Paradise Labs’ Extremely Public Displays of Privacy, part of this year’s recently wrapped-up Philadelphia Live Arts Festival, asks how and whether we can locate authenticity in the age of carefully curated web presence. In the process, it delivers a data bomb to presence and corporeality, concepts that remain increasingly marked targets in theatrical discourse. It is a performance adventure in three acts, several social networking platforms, and multiple spatialities. Needless to say, this was the Festival piece I was looking forward to with the greatest anticipation.

Act 1 is performed across the virtual prosceniums of Facebook, Tumblr, and Youtube and can be accessed whenever you please at www.extremelypublicdisplays.com. The protagonists are Fess Elliott (Annie Enneking) — maternal milquetoast and middle-aged musician who fled the allure of the limelight in her youth — and Beatrix Luff (Brittany Freece and Mary Tuimanen), enigmatic internet persona and web celebrity at large. Fess falls prey to Beatrix’s electro siren song, following her into data streams and the anxieties of exposure.

Act 2 is an interactive walking tour through Philadelphia’s Rittenhouse Square, led by Ms. Elliott via podcast. It can be downloaded to your portable device here. Fess completes a series of seven scandalous public displays as assigned by Beatrix, part of a condensed seminar on successful exhibitionism. At any given moment, the site she occupies on the screen corresponds identically to the spectator’s view of the surrounding environs. In a scene outside Little Pete’s Diner, if the viewer’s iPod is properly aligned with the building’s outline, it creates an optical illusion in which Fess appears to be standing just across the street. There are several of these perfectly choreographed moments when her virtual presence penetrates material space.

Acts 1 and 2 are spectacular specimens of transmedial theater. They make use of media technologies not only to connect users/viewers to a virtual love affair, but immerse them in it entirely. They also never stray into the realm of pedantry or proselytizing. Beatrix, a young digital native and new media artist, stands in for the utopian promise of how the web might function as a dematerialized stage against which a chorus of posthumans can perform multiple selves. Fess is positioned at the opposite pole, wary of how online activity might feed into a control society of ubiquitous surveillance. She retreats to the solitude of an isolated bunker and goes off the virtual grid, following media theorist Alex Galloway’s suggestion that “avant-garde practices” in the digital age are those of “non-existence.”

In Act 3, we are invited into the material space of Fess’s private bunker for a 75-minute concert peppered with brief storytelling and family photograph show-and-tell. While Annie Enneking is an artist and songstress of immense talent, Act 3 is frustrating in some respects — and, it would seem, intentionally so. At this point, having so diligently studied Mmes. Elliott and Lux, we arrive with the expectation of witnessing something authentic between or about these women beyond what we’ve hitherto experienced. They will be appearing live, and in the flesh. Beatrix, whom Fess refers to as her “invisible girlfriend,” never makes an appearance. We learn that Fess’s fragrance of choice is called Everything.

Fess has lined the walls of her studio with sheet metal to obstruct any electronic signals that would try to penetrate her media-free fortress. This room is located inside a large wooden box onto which videos of Fess and Beatrix are projected on a loop. Unbeknownst to Fess, she is situated squarely within a cubic field of mediatized representation.

Extremely Public Displays of Privacy runs until October 1st.

Popularity: 2% [?]

It may not exactly be the kick-off of the 2011 Next Wave Festival at BAM (that was a couple weeks ago, depending on which part of the programming you’re referring to), but tonight is Culturebot’s first foray into it, with Belgian choreographer Thierry Smits’ Compagnie Thor presenting To the Ones I Love (through Oct. 1; tickets $40). It’s a tricky piece: using a score by Johann Sebastian Bach and extrapolating from balletic technique, Smits presents a work featuring nine black dancers that plays on references both to Africa and the Western tradition while claiming to avoid exoticism in favor of something that explores “the body in movement, the pleasure of dancing, and wants to share loving energy to the spectator.”

Popularity: 5% [?]

Photo by Juniper Shuey

Nearly two weeks ago now, while sitting in the theater at Portland (Ore.) State University’s Lincoln Hall where zoe | juniper‘s A Crack in Everything was playing as part of the TBA Festival, I got to thinking about the idea of “eternal recurrence.” This was not actually the first time dance had inspired that. I’m not much of philosopher, unfortunately, my understanding of the concept having less to do with Nietzsche or any other part of its long provenance than with Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, so I probably can’t do it proper justice. But think of it as a thought experiment: Imagine that our lives–all of history, really–repeat an infinite number of times. Identically. Like the movie Groundhog’s Day, but without the opportunity to change or fix what you’ve done. You’re just stuck with it. So what does this do to each experience, however seemingly insignificant? Instead of passing by in the flash of the vanishing present, each experience takes on a weight and significance we wouldn’t normally grant it.

For such a seemingly cerebral concept, it’s something dance is–in my experience–much better at dealing with than literature or text-based performance. The intellectual in me wants to try to riff on how this all has something to do with verb tense, but at a pretty basic level, the issue has to do with immediacy. Text is never really the same as the experience it records–it’s a processing of experience through language, a record, almost a memory itself. And so when it tries to tackle experience, it can only really do it through that sort of remove. Memory is a big topic in literature, but from this perspective, literature about memory is at a double remove from the thing itself; experience requires an immediacy you can’t get through text, which has already processed it.

Dance, though, gets to sort of have it both ways. On the one hand, you have the actual, physical presence of the dancer’s body, inhabiting the immediacy of experience in the moment you’re seeing it. On the other, through the choreography, construction, design, scenography, whatever, the experience can be contextualized, framed, examined within the larger work. Even theater, which would seem to offer both the immediacy of presence as well as the text, tends to fail at such a project. Beckett I think did it, in Play and some of the later works, but, well, that’s Beckett.

Anyway, the point is, I think this is as good a way as any to approach A Crack in Everything, a complex, provocative, and occasionally stunning dance-installation (the set itself rises to the latter definition, plus there is an actual attendant gallery piece which I did not see). Its central images all focus an unrelenting gaze on experiences, inhabited by the dancers, engaging them over and over again, in a sense chopping up the linear flow of time to demand we consider otherwise fleeting moments, without the comforting sfumato effect memory offers.

The work is the collaboration of choreographer Zoe Scofield, and her husband, visual artist Juniper Shuey. I’ve known them in some capacity for a couple years (they’re based in Seattle) but I haven’t actually seen too much of Scofield’s work. In fact, of the half-dozen (perhaps) times I’ve seen her perform previously, all but one were work-in-progress or rehearsal excerpts of this piece, which debuted at Jacob’s Pillow and is touring over the year and will be at New York Live Arts in April (a co-commissioner of the work, along with TBA and others).

Scofield is a fine dancer and subtle, very physical choreographer, but the work makes dynamic use of Shuey’s design contributions in ways that add substantially to the effect. As it opens, a couple of the dancers emerge in darkness and begin to perform on a dimly lit stage. Spatially, they work a line across the downstage area, near what will turn out to be a milky glass wall running the width of the space. What we’re greeted with first is a series of ephemeral images, with counterpointing dancers being revealed by lighting behind (or perhaps projected on, or perhaps both–I couldn’t actually tell) the glass wall.

But the first truly impressive sequence comes next. As the stage explodes with light, the company of four (three women, one man) dancers ups the tempo of the piece considerably in the upstage area, while Scofield herself performs a long left-to-right solo across the glass, spinning and moving herself slowly, the whole while tracing (parts of) her silhouette in a red marker on the glass. It’s long and forceful, and what we’re ultimately left with is a beautiful image capturing the spirit of the piece. After this, the glass wall, perhaps six or eight feet tall, raises 3/4 of the way into the vertical space, framing the stage with an evocation of the central image of movement as experience and memory both.

My favorite part, though, comes a little bit later. The four female dancers essentially repeat Scofield’s solo from left to right as the lone male dancer, Raja Kelly, playing a sort of Spirit of Time, simply walks among them, picking them up and moving them back toward stage-left, where they pick up from that moment in space and continue moving right (forward) again. In other words, it’s a bit like rewinding a video over and over again to watch certain moments.

The effect is pretty overwhelming, because Scofield’s style is so formally intense. I’ve occasionally said that “no one moves quite like” Scofield, but that’s not entirely true; rather, Scofield’s body has a unique quality that she maximizes the use of in her dance. Lean and muscular and occasionally appearing double-jointed (not really, I think, but I’m drawing a picture here), her body exaggerates the slightest movement because it’s so visibly apparent on her. A shift of weight or balance, a twist of the torso, a rotation of the arm: you see all of them as big, dramatic gestures despite their subtlety. I suspect the effect is furthered by what I understand was study in Ohad Naharin’s Gaga movement in Israel. Whatever the case, the challenge Scofield faced, as I saw it, was translating this distinctively style into her company. And I was pleasantly surprised by how well she pulled it off.

This long rewind/replay sequence called on the other dancers to match Scofield’s abilities more than, I think, any other part of A Crack in Everything. Their progress occurs in stutters, the process of getting between each tableau a set of highly articulated shifts, during which the dancers really have to paint those subtle changes with big strokes. Mostly they succeed. One dancer in particularly really owned it, but without a line-up I can’t be sure which (I think it’s Diana Deaver, a Brooklyn-based artist), but all of them were sufficiently up to the task that the effect carried.

The result was powerful, constantly refocusing the audience on these deeply emotionally resonant moments, forcing you to look at them over and over again. It was damn near breathtaking, and one of the more fascinating moments I’ve seen in a dance piece in a while.

Really, my only possible complaint would be that overall, the piece feels like it references this experience-as-motion-through-time motif once or twice too often. There is a video sequence toward the end that winds up feeling a little redundant (as it’s still framed by drawing-on-glass and comes shortly after the replay sequence). It’s essentially just a slow-motion gray-scale video of random people walking around some public place, on the street, but it utilizes a fairly cool effect by which you only see them as they move; otherwise they fade into a gray field. It’s not that there’s anything wrong with it, but I wasn’t sure it added anything besides providing a tempo and mood shift to lead into the end of the piece. But that’s probably quibbling and my opinion might be swayed next time I see it, because it is part of the visual element of the show, which is remarkably beautiful and which I’ve barely touched on. The image of a red line recurs throughout as a motif in a couple different ways (see the picture above) and the various lighting, video, and image effects of the piece are pretty remarkable in their own right, making me sorry to have missed the gallery installation.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I have to admit it up front: I was pretty skeptical. I told Michel Groisman as much when we met briefly seated next to one another at The Long Table on Proximity on Saturday at 61 Local. Often when I go into a performance from an artist I’m not familiar with, I enter with a very open mind. I don’t know what to expect. With Groisman, though, a couple weeks ago PS 122 shot me an email and asked whether I might be interested in interviewing him for a preview. As is often the case, I agreed and only then went on to research my subject. Not much is written on Groisman in English, and not wanting to strain my Portuguese translation favors, I relied mostly on Internet videos.

So what was I supposed to expect from a guy who tapes cards to his audience? Gets them to play with water? Straps candles to himself and lights them while contorting? Or who does a performance of making shapes with his hands “composed of 3 independent parts” of “1 hour of duration each”? While conceptually cool, I suspected to find the work leaning more toward self-indulgence than inspired.

But, as is often the case when I get an idea like that in my head, I was wrong. Very wrong.

Groisman brought four works to New York last week, where he was presented by PS 122, covering more than ten years of his career: Transferencia (Transference) (1999), Polvo (Octopus) (2000), Sirva-se (Help Yourself) (2004), and Porta das Mãos (Door of Hands) (2007). A fifth piece, The Long Table on Proximity, is an installment of Lois Weaver’s dinner party-as-performance, and featured Groisman and his partner, Weaver, and anyone else who wanted to sit at the table and talk.

Let me set the scene for Transferencia, which took place on the second floor (with a lovely view out the window) of the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. You enter the room to find chairs, benches, and tables with cushions all surrounding a small, maybe six-by-six-foot wooden platform raised about eighteen inches off the ground. On it lie the steampunk-looking accoutrements of the piece, all brown leather straps and plastic tubing. You sit, and eventually Groisman, dressed down in a tight tan outfit, enters, takes off his shoes, climbs on the platform, and after carefully inserting lighters under the thigh-straps of his shorts, begins to strap on the gear. The process is slow and contemplative, taking several minutes. By the time he’s finished, there are two long candles strapped to the bottom of his feet pointing backward, and two more strapped to his upper-arm, pointing down from the elbow.

He then lights three of the candles with a lighter before slipping it back under the leg of his shorts, and then proceeds to assume a sort of tableau showcasing the three lit candles. Then, very carefully, he shifts position to recreate the trio of lights by lighting the forth candle and swapping out its flame for another’s. Simultaneous to the moment of ignition, he extinguishes one of the other candles by way of the plastic tubing, which snakes from his mouth down to a guide on the candle-holding apparatus that aims it right at the flame. A light puff of air, and one candle is doused as another flutters to life. Then the process repeats for perhaps ten minutes. Then the sequence ends. Groisman stops, changes positions for the candles, perhaps adds another pair, and proceeds for another roughly ten minutes. There was a short break halfway through for him to rest; the performance was roughly an hour.

It’s hard to explain exactly why it’s so captivating, or such a moving experience, in words. Suffice it to say that my initial doubts were due mostly to a failure to appreciate how a piece can work from a truly successful presence based artist. Proximity certainly plays a role. In The Long Table discussion, a few people mentioned how compelling it was to watch Groisman as the flames came dangerously close to his skin. The postures he assumes seem sometimes precarious, and all the more so as he shifts through positions. Nor is his movement fluid and graceful in the way of a dancer–the pacing is even and there is a distinct flow created, but this emerges mainly by virtue of training your gaze on the candles. What Groisman is actually doing is rotating about as far as he can in certain joints, then shifting slightly to finish the movement, which occasionally leaves the flame for what feels an interminably long time mere centimeters from sometimes bare flesh. The nervous male in me almost flinched numerous times during one sequence where the shift occurred with the flame dangerously near his most sensitive masculine area (the protection offered by the spandex-y shorts notwithstanding).

Perhaps it just my own experience, but for all that, I rarely found myself watching Groisman himself. Instead, what I saw was the movement as reflected in the positions of the candles, and this fundamentally altered my experience of the transference for which the show is named.

You might suspect that this act should be occurring by transferring the flame from one candle (lit) to another (unlit), but the actual experience is quite different. With the focus shifted from the performer’s  body to the flames, what you see is a flame disappeared from one place (the extinguishing candle) and reappearing somewhere distinct at basically the exact same moment (the lit candle). In other words, it has nothing to do with lighting and dousing four candles, it’s about three flames which seem to be able make spatial leaps. The experience is Zen-like and meditative; space and time sort of collapse during the experience, opening up a fantastic, magical space. It’s the work of a very subtle but talented artist.

Another story. Porta das Mãos (Door of Hands) I didn’t get to see because of other engagements (it played here twice, on Wednesday and Friday). This is the piece I was most skeptical of–identified as an up to three-hour-long performance “about connection and transformation. Just by touching two fingers of one hand and two fingers of the other hand and never disconnecting them, it reveals an innumerous series of forms in constant transformation.” Performance documentation shows Groisman doing it over a projector, so that the images of his hands is blown up in massive scale in site-specific or gallery spaces, which I understand is how it was performed the first night. But outside 61 Local, I got to talking with Vallejo Gantner, the artistic director of PS 122, who told me an interesting story. Wanting to show the work to some other presenters on a trip to Brazil a while back, Gantner got Groisman to simply perform part of the piece for them in a bar or cafe, and the result–much like my experience of Transferencia–was electric.

If I understand correctly, for the second performance, Groisman shifted perspective to something closer to what Gantner described, perhaps better suited from the smaller scale Invisible Dog space.

In my interview with Groisman, I tried asking about these relationships in his work. A three-hour performance in a museum gallery that can engaged and disengaged in passing is different temporally and spatially than a more traditional, sit-down-and-watch-this performance. Responding, Groisman described his work in a way I wouldn’t understand until I experienced it:

[I]t is very important to question the barriers, especially if this is possible in a gentle and sensitive way, promoting a natural process, without forcing anything…I noticed that some knowledge is only possible through experience. For this reason I created works that were like an invitation for people to come out of a conceptual relationship to enter into a relationship sensory, experiential and dynamic.

So yes, I made a big mistake by not recognizing the potential in Groisman’s work from the beginning: had I spent all of the latter half of last week seeing and experiencing Groisman’s performances, I think I would have had a better time than I did. I do hope some readers out there have the chance to come across this before they make the same mistake I did, and hope I have the chance to experience it again.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Over the course of the past year Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey worked independently, creating encounters with individuals whose experience and expertise was outside the field of dance. Cardona’s project was called Intervention and Lacey’s was called My First Time With A Dramaturge. Each of them used this process – which manifested as 14 independent one-time performances – to create a solo. Then this summer they came together to create a duet and interpolate/integrate the solos into an evening length performance called Tool Is Loot.

It is an interesting premise for an investigative creative process, but not having seen any of the 14 one-offs firsthand, I was left wondering how the information they gathered was integrated into the final product. Sometimes it seemed obvious – snippets of dialogue were included in Jonathan Bepler’s score – and one assumes these were taken from the non-dance experts that were part of the development process. Other times – for instance Lacey’s opening dance with a folding chair – it was less easy to tell.

It raises an interesting, and recurring, question. How much do we need to know about background and process to appreciate the work itself? Can it be enjoyed and encountered on its own terms? Or is it absolutely necessary to know the entire backstory of a piece from inspiration to influence to process to implementation?

Going into Tool Is Loot on Friday I didn’t know much of the backstory at all. I knew a little bit about Wally’s Intervention series but that was about it. And I found that even had I known less than that, I still would have enjoyed the piece.

Both Lacey and Cardona are compelling dancers, in different ways.

Cardona is quick and quirky – he did a lot of work on his tiptoes and with his upper body and arms. He is nimble and assured, transitioning cleanly and confidently between small, idiosyncratic movements and grander, sweeping gestures. Sporting a really bushy “Village People” moustache, he came off as kind of a jokester with an edgy undertone.

Lacey is also quick and quirky but in a different way. She has a great sense of humor and moves with grace and precision, but where Cardona seems to move from his outer extremities, Lacey seems to have her energy more centered in her pelvis and core. She just feels very grounded and earthy and deeply vibrant.

I may be a bit biased because my favorite part of the show was actually Lacey’s monologue to a chair, which was both touching and hilarious. She delivers the monologue as if she were on a date, at that point in the relationship where it has been casual and now it is going to get more serious because the connection has deepened. The scene could have felt awkward and misguided, but her delivery was so natural, open and funny that you immediately bought it and went with her. As the monologue morphed into a movement sequence in which she gets rather, um, amorous with the chair it was fascinating to see the humor give way to intense physicality.

Cardona and Lacey’s dancing together was a great balance of their different energies and vocabularies and was consistently engaging.

And though some people weren’t so crazy about the end sequence – basically a 5 minute light show after the dancers had left the stage – I found it to be a compelling coda or question mark, a cue to process information in a different way, to meditate on what we had just witnessed in the dance and think about all the other ways that ideas can be researched, embodied, transformed and transmitted.

Tool Is Loot was a wonderful, thoughtful and engaging performance made by two very different but equally gifted dancers. It would be nice if we could have access to their “research” and see how they got from Point A to Point B. But who knows? Maybe they’ll revisit their investigation and making something else? Only time will tell.

Popularity: 2% [?]

This looks AMAZING!!!! Conceived of and curated by Sally Silver “A Prize Every Time” looks to be a fascinating series of investigations by super-talented artists. While individual projects may result in genius, or disaster, or land somewhere in between, there will almost certainly be more than a few flashes of brilliance during these 4 nights of movement-centered, on-the-spot collaborations. Each night Theater Directors, Choreographers, Coaches, & Instructors from diverse fields and backgrounds will construct new performance compositions live and on the spot. Each collaborative ‘team’ will work on and with genre performers (different each night) from dance, theater, sports, burlesque, and more, to create 3 or 4 works-in-progress per night in front of you: the audience.

Participants (subject to change & will vary each night) include

Choreographers: Monica Bill Barnes, Jane Comfort, Pat Catterson, Terry Creach, Wally Cardona, Douglas Dunn, Maura Donohue, Keely Garfield, Neil Greenberg, Patricia Hoffbauer, Sarah East Johnson, Pooh Kaye, Jonathan Kinzel, Bebe Miller, Rosalind Newman, Sarah Skaggs, Gus Solomon, Jr., Muna Tseng, Arturo Vidich, & Bill Young.

Theater Directors: John Jesurun, Young Jean Lee, Matthew Maguire, Theresa Buchheister, Damien Gray, Dan Safer, Gayle Stahlhuth, Tony Torn, George Emilio Sanchez, Scott Lyons & Jeffrey Jones among others.

Updates will be posted on the Roulette website.

A PRIZE EVERY TIME
Concept and Programming by Sally Silvers
Wed Oct 12 – 8:00 PM
Fri Oct 14 – 8:00 PM
Sat Oct 15 – 8:00 PM
Sun Oct 16 – 8:00 PM
$15 General Admission
$10 Members/Students/Seniors

at ROULETTE
509 ATLANTIC AVE (at the corner of 3rd Ave)
2, 3, 4, 5, A, C, G, D, M, N, R, B & Q trains and the LIRR
Downtown Brooklyn
www.roulette.org

Sally Silvers has been making dances for 30 years & her association with Roulette goes back almost as far. She has performed and taught (improvisation, composition, repertory) nationally & internationally. Her theoretical writing, scores, and poetry have appeared in several journals including The Drama Review, an anthology of new writings by women published by Illinois University Press, and many poetry magazines. Silvers has received support for her choreography from the National Endowment for the Arts six times, twice from Meet the Composer/Choreographer Project for collaborations with John Zorn and Bruce Andrews, from the NY Foundation for the Arts, the Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and from a Guggenheim Fellowship. Silvers is a New York Dance and Performance “Bessie” winner, has co-directed 2 dance films, Little Lieutenant and Mechanics of the Brain, and choreographed 3 musicals for the Sundance Theater Festival in Utah. She developed her concept of “live choreography” (making work live in front of an audience) in the mid-90’s. From 2006 to 2011, she danced in the recent new works of Yvonne Rainer.

Popularity: 8% [?]

Photo by Katrin Schoof

Last week, French choreographer Xavier Le Roy brough a pair of shows to FIAF’s Crossing the Line Festival. Monday was More Mouvements fur Lachenmann, a deconstructive movement/music piece, followed up on Tuesday by Product of Circumstances, which is part of the festival’s curated “lecture performance” series.

I missed Lachenman, which Andy caught instead, and he didn’t like it too much. Having spoken to him about it at length, I’m still not sure I would have had the same response. At the very least, I’m sad to have missed it, because Product of Circumstances only served to further my sense of Le Roy as an adventurous artist in the long line of those who have approached their form as radical critique, often exploring and altering the very foundation of the work.

Product of Circumstances was developed nearly 15 years ago as an essay contribution to a conference on performance, and through a combination of text, slides, and some movement, traces Le Roy’s development from molecular biologist to dance maker. It’s less a biographical piece, though, than it is a manifesto structured as anecdote. As a young man finishing his advanced degree in science, Le Roy was working on breast cancer diagnostics, where his youthful idealism ran into the cold hard reality of the marketplace. As a scientist, Le Roy had previously operated with a belief that there was a Truth out there which could be identified through proper objective rigorous inquiry.

At the same time, the dynamics of his personal life were pushing him towards dance as a hobby, and he ultimately made the switch from science to art when confronted by his boss’s unwillingness to accept Le Roy’s skepticism regarding test results, which was viewed as an inconvenient delay in publishing results and basking in the supposed success of the experiment.

But even if art and its subjectivity allowed Le Roy to explore something from a perspective he could embrace, that didn’t mean he was entirely liberated. The demands of the arts marketplace, to say nothing of the ease of falling into patterns and habits, leaves Le Roy deeply skeptical of his own work. And this is what really fascinated me in the presentation: Le Roy seems to try to apply (from time to time at least) the same rigorous inquiry to his own practice he once did to scientific endeavors. The portrait of the artist that emerges is of one who’s skeptical of any first principles, any assumptions at all. Le Roy specifically references working on a recreation of an Eighties piece by Yvonne Rainer as both inspiring and near crippling, because it left him with the sense that there was nothing left to do. But that desire to interrogate the form and reject developed technique for a more genuine engagement in the body seems to be the thread that weaves Le Roy’s work together, and I’m looking forward to getting to see more of his art in the future.

It’s also worth noting that the next performance lecture is this Tuesday, Sept. 27, and features the physical theater artist Jos Houbens. It’s a piece on humor, and friends of mine from London who saw this at the mime fest there a year or two ago say it’s amazing, so see if you can still get tickets.

Popularity: 2% [?]

Irish anti-performance dance company Fitzgerald & Stapleton are bringing a new work, The Smell of Want, to Abrons Arts Center for a week-long run starting October 3. The company’s first New York commission was at The Chocolate Factory last year, where they performed The Work, The Work, a sometimes confounding, sometimes brutal dissection of the role of women in contemporary society, that bounded from topics as diverse as economic distress to body hatred. In The Smell of Want, the pair–aided by a larger company of performers–will explore desire, love, and relationships…plus some. If the preview video is confusing to American readers, that’s because it’s a reference to a Guinness ad, which can be seen below.

Popularity: 14% [?]