A week after seeing a preview performance of Einstein on the Beach and there’s still this feeling of having taken a trip to a 1976 sci-fi time capsule. An operatic spaceship. It was a four-hour train ride from Chicago to the Power Center at the University of Michigan, a venue that in mid-January was home to epic rehearsals of the show. “There’s no doubt about it,” wrote the University Musical Society in fervent pre-show emails. “This is a seriously historic moment.” Historic, yes, but like visiting a sepia-colored dream of some NASA engineer–after a particularly long day pushing buttons in big glasses and a comb-over. Smart, beautiful, disorienting, dated.

A lot of that has to do with the set. The biggest pieces roll onstage in grey plywood slabs, from the wings, with haze and smoke billowing out around them. Prison bars made of ribbons dangle from the battens and billow slightly from the gust of passing performers. Most of the color is flat shades of white, black and grey, with very little blending, and even when we are presented with the representation of an actual building, there’s no attempt to, say, carve a faux stone façade from Styrofoam. We’re very obviously looking at a painted backdrop. Even a giant wall of chasing light bulbs is literally made of old-school yellow globes, not something more modern like LEDs. And yet, that the setting looks like it came out of a Theater History Textbook contributes to its other-worldliness, and its modern meaning.

The scenic accuracy is deliberate. It’s been 20 years since the last re-staging of Einstein on the Beach. There was one in 1984, and again in 1992, when I was 5 and 13, respectively. Creators Robert Wilson, Phillip Glass and Lucinda Childs collaborated to ensure the creation of an accurate re-staging of the original. The work has been the subject of a PBS documentary and is said to have changed perception of modern opera.

This is clear from the production in a number of ways. That the endurance required from the performers is astounding. That aspects of its composition seem tired at this point, having been aggressively adopted into modern opera. That the whole piece is basically a 4.5 hour mental workout, demanding that you stay engaged while challenging you with endless looping chants of numbers, non-narrative speeches, robotic gestures, and straight-out goofiness.

In one of the strongest sequences of the piece, featured performer Kate Moran repeats a line describing an experience in a supermarket: “There were these bathing caps you could buy that had these kind of Fourth of July plumes on them,” while slowly moving through space, changing costumes. In the original production, Childs was the featured performer who recited these lines on loop. In this production, Moran owns the text. I never got tired of hearing those lines–with every repetition, the inflection and meaning would change. Sometimes subtly, sometimes dramatically, always engaging.

The same is true, to a certain extent, of Glass’ music, in which choruses sing numbers that blend into sentences and words. It’s a little bit like listening to a kaleidoscope. The chorus sings from the pit, from a jury box onstage, in amorphous groups. Everyone wears suspenders, a white dress shirt, and slacks—an outfit stereotypical for Einstein and absolutely ridiculous for anyone else.

So here I am, sitting in a theater of a marathon length of time, watching a work with sets that look like they came out of a vault, everyone’s wearing suspenders and singing numbers, and the lead violinist is actually dressed like Einstein. People are puffing their cheeks out and reciting nonsensical phrases. There is a court scene. There is a caboose scene. There are several dance sequences. There is a visual theme of a bright white line. And all throughout, people are getting up to go to the bathroom as is necessary, because there isn’t any intermission.

It feels both glorious and totally insane—like a dream.

Which is kind of the point. In the PBS documentary, Wilson speaks of the work as depicting character, not narrative. Glass talks about trusting visual and psychological associations with Einstein as a basis for the work. Both acknowledge the German physicist as a powerful, almost godlike presence in their culture. With this devoted re-staging of Einstein on the Beach, Glass and Wilson claim their own territory within the word “godlike,” and the production celebrates not Einstein but the machinations and developments of its lead artists.

With just cause. Ever watch an old movie and think “Well, this is kind of cliché,” and then realize “Wait a minute—this is the thing that MADE the clichés”? That’s what watching Einstein on the Beach is like, for some of us who didn’t grow up in the atomic age, but are instead living in its hangover. For some of us who are familiar with the visual machinations of contemporary opera. For some of us who read about Wilson in our college textbooks and have seen Phillip Glass become the subject of sketch comedy. It comes with a kind of smirking respect. Like when you’re grateful for the incredible sacrifice your grandparents made but wish they’d stop talking about themselves at the dinner table.

So if coming back from this opera is like emerging from a 1976 Time Spaceship, it’s worth the trip, if only to appreciate the contributions of works past and the developments in the field since then. Makes you want to kiss the ground. A little.

Popularity: unranked [?]

Oh, the days when slapping a video behind a dance or music piece made it a ‘multimedia performance.’ The novelty rapidly waned, and our expectations for multimedia are higher now—as they should be. Still, it’s a treat to be newly amazed by the possibilities of video in live performance. The dance/performance installation Takes (presented by Philadelphia-based Nichole Canuso Dance Company at 3LD Art and Technology Center this past weekend as part of the APAP blitz) integrated live video and projections with a subtle, yet knock-your-socks-off level of inventiveness.

The credit for the concept of Takes goes to Nichole Canuso and multimedia director Lars Jan, a 2011 TEDGlobal Fellow who has produced a slew of intriguing performance/installation projects. Performed by choreographer Canuso and Dito Van Reigersberg within the confines of a box created by white gauze-like walls, Takes is a series of snippets about a relationship gone sour. The substance and the magic of this piece lies in live projections of the performers onto the transparent walls of the box: the action inside the box is recorded simultaneously by multiple cameras and superimposed on the walls/screens, creating different perspectives and layers of each moment that add up to more than the individual parts. Combining all this with an evocative sound score and skillful lighting, Takes casts a net of intimacy that is impossible not to fall into.

Nonetheless, the choreography, while no doubt crafted with an eye towards the projections, is largely unremarkable in terms of its movement vocabulary. Structurally, the piece follows the predictable arc of an angst-ridden love story, with some fragments reading more strongly than others, and a few trite moments along the way (ironic that a paper letter takes center stage in an era of electronic communication).

The close-ups and level of detail captured by the cameras mean that gestures come across particularly powerfully, and these are the moments that stuck in my mind: his fingers playfully marching up her knee in the beginning, and later, his fists striking the air in frustration. The solo sections are the least engaging, perhaps because they rely more heavily on movement alone, as opposed to the interactions between Canuso and Van Reigersberg. The performers’ commitment to the work salvages some of these shortcomings, but can’t rescue them entirely.

The suggestive possibilities of the projections and rich quality of the images is nothing less than mesmerizing, but as I watched the video loop roll across the screens at the end, I realized that I was rather satisfied with these pre-recorded projections of movement. Am I just a junkie for beautiful footage? I’d like to think not—Takes is missing something in the link between video, choreography, and performance, and this time, the gap isn’t on the multimedia side.

Popularity: 2% [?]

With Performa having recently concluded and in the wake of the Marina Abramovic kerfuffle at the MOCA gala, I have been giving a lot of thought to the difference between visual art performance and contemporary performance – more specifically, Time-Based Art with its origins in dance and theater. This is an ongoing obsession of mine and one that I feel needs to be addressed critically. Thanks largely to RoseLee Goldberg, who literally wrote the book on performance art, the visual arts world has “rediscovered” performance in an unprecedented way. Unlike RoseLee, it seems that many of the visual arts curators currently working to promote visual arts performance lack knowledge in contemporary performance, and I think this presents a problem, as well as a challenge.

At the moment, Independent Curators International is offering a workshop on Curating Performance that features a group of teacher/advisors drawn entirely from the visual arts world who don’t appear to have backgrounds in contemporary performance. I find it surprising that ICI couldn’t find – or weren’t interested in finding – a single representative of the contemporary performance sector. And then I started thinking about who they could have approached and I realized that the number of performance curators who can speak eloquently and thoughtfully about why they program what they do is few and far between. Most of the curators I know are reluctant to speak about their criteria and aesthetic frameworks. I imagine this is one reason why the Institute For Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan was created. I have reached out to both ICI and ICPP for syllabi and reading lists to compare/contrast. If and when I receive those materials, I will write an addendum to this post. For now, rather than focus on the different curatorial perspectives I would like to share some of my subjective responses and thoughts related to the difference between visual art performance and contemporary performance.

In the past two weeks I have had several substantial discussions about this topic, two of which stick out for me. The first conversation was with one of New York’s most esteemed artistic director/curators and the other with a prominent director whose work has spanned both avant-garde performance and mainstream theater. From the artistic director I was told, “The visual arts world hates craft, they’re seeking ‘authenticity’,” suggesting that when a visual artist stages a performative event it should not have any degree of artifice, that it be perceived as “real”.

The director I spoke to said that the visual arts world, somewhat understandably, finds theater laughable and as a result rarely studies it. While I share the visual arts world’s distaste for popular theater predicated on “psychological realism”, I lament the fact that there are many, many devoted practitioners of contemporary performance who are as dramaturgically engaged in the construction of their time-based work as visual artists are in creating the intellectual framework around their object-based work, and that this is, apparently, not recognized or valued by the visual arts world. It is as if when visual artists and curators “discover performance” they think that they are the first to ever encounter the aesthetic issues it proposes. It would seem that they are frequently unaware of – or indifferent to – the fact that there is a long history of performance theory; that theater, and especially dance, have for many years explored issues around presence, embodiment, presentational aesthetics, the observed/observer relationship, the visual presentation of the constructed environment, the semiotics of representation, etc., etc. The visual art world might be surprised to read Hans-Thies Lehmann’s seminal writing on post-dramatic theater. They might be surprised to be exposed to the work of Rich Maxwell, Philippe Quesne, Cuqui Jerez, Xavier LeRoy and others who work extremely hard to create rigorous stagings of “the real” – who use artifice to create an experience of the real that is almost indistinguishable from the “real thing”. Or the work of Annie Dorsen who, in using computer programs and simulations, completely undermines the notion of “the real” itself.

I don’t know a lot about visual arts curatorial practice, but I have seen my fair share of both visual art performance and contemporary performance and the lack of meaningful dialogue between the two practices is troubling.

While Performa has taken the long view on visual art performance, tracing its development over the past 100 years or so, I think that when most people talk about performance art from a visual arts perspective they are referring to work that traces its precedents to the 50s through the 80′s, after which performance art fell more or less out of fashion. This may be ascribed (I’m just winging it here, but its a theory) to the rise of solo performance from a performance background – Karen Finley, et al - being labeled Performance Art and a desire by the visual art world to distance itself from that aesthetic.

There’s a revealing interview with Roselee Golberg on artinfo in which she says: “First, I think that artists who’ve never worked with performance before, they really almost don’t know where to begin” and then:

They haven’t dealt with things like performance rehearsals, they haven’t dealt with things like auditions, they haven’t dealt with things like lighting….Then there’s the next layer of questions I ask, where I’m really the guinea pig, I’m the audience member. If I’m going to walk into this room, what is it going to feel like when I walk in? What is the room going to look like? Is there going to be sound right away? What kind of feeling do you want people to have? I spent all these years thinking about performance, looking for all these things that did work or didn’t work, and I feel like that’s my role sometimes, to be critical.

Earlier in the same interview she says:

I think what Performa did was suddenly say, let’s dream up another kind of artist performance, and let’s give visual artists who maybe have never made this kind of work before a chance to create something extraordinary that is the equivalent of beautiful work that we are seeing in galleries and museums, and not backwards-looking material that seems to be getting further and further in the corner in a way and being very much about ‘70s and ‘80s and so on.

The basic idea of artists creating performance that is equivalent to the work in galleries or museums is a compelling proposition – but at the same time it suggests that only those artists identified as visual artists who are entering – naively and lacking practical knowledge and historical background – into the world of performance, are going to be making that work.  It largely ignores the signifcant body of work being created by time-based artists for whom performance is their primary discipline and does nothing to raise the value and perception of that work. To me this is problematic.

Ideally I would love to see Performa acknowledge even more work by time-based artists – directors, choreographers, ensembles – who are creating, on a regular basis, contemporary performance. That seems unlikely, in which case I would like to see the world of Contemporary Performance engage in parallel strategies to those of Performa and work harder to elevate the valuation and perception of staged or site-based performance work. Rather than the chaotic mishmash of APAP season festivals, I can imagine a new festival that ties together the most forward-focused work from UTR, Coil and American Realness under one umbrella with thoughtful dramaturgy and academic panels.

So what are some of the differences between Visual Art Performance and Contemporary Performance?

First I would suggest the notion of context and infrastructure. Visual Art, historically, is about the creation of objects – paintings, sculptures, photographs – that can be sold. One impulse behind Visual Art Performance was the rejection of making objects for sale in favor of creating non-commodifiable, ephemeral events that were meant to critique and undermine the capitalist structures of the art market. Some artists, like Marina Abramovic, have managed to commodify that work in retrospect, completely abandoning any pretense of anti-capitalism, in fact becoming major players in it. (Cue the MOCA Gala kerfuffle).

Since Visual Art has historically been about the creation of objects for sale, there is a massive infrastructure in place to create value around objects – museums, galleries, academics, journals, etc. Artists create with an accompanying intellectual framework and  put their art into the marketplace where it is contextualized by critics, academics and curators. This helps create perceived value. If it gets into a museum show, it raises the value. If the artist works assiduously to hone their public image and awareness of their “brand” the value continues to rise. Objects that were created, essentially, without value beyond the cost of materials, become more prized due to scarcity and a sort of symbolic connection to a larger cultural framework. This art object is then bought and resold over time, with the hope that it will continue to rise in value. Artists rarely share in the resale revenues of work that has significantly appreciated in value, but that’s another story. The Visual Art marketplace is, in a way, as pure an expression of capitalism as one could imagine. The irony of the art world’s frequent embrace of leftist anti-capitalist ideology is not lost on me.

The recent rediscovery of performance by the Visual Art world could be viewed, cynically, as the latest fashion in a milieu that mostly values the new and the “edgy”. Tino Sehgal is a laughable choreographer, but he’s a brilliant businessman. And the art world, to be frank, is somewhat masochistic. They love nothing more than someone who can fuck with them in a novel and ingenious way. The fact that Sehgal has monetized abstraction and ephemerality is a stroke of genius. He has taken advantage of the thrill-seeking impulse of the hyper-capitalist art market and managed, like a financial services whiz, to turn the mere idea of a performance into money. Brilliant.

I propose that when most visual artists come to performance, they are still thinking within the framework of object-making. They may be engaging with concepts around experience and representation, but from a perspective of bringing visual art to life in the time-based world using the techniques and tropes with which they are already familiar. They may not be concerned with the study of movement and embodied presence, of the craft of performance or the  challenges of the created environment. In contrast, Contemporary Performance as a genre has its roots in theater and dance. Experimental, to be sure, but rooted in explorations that are primarily focused on the performative event itself.

I’m no fan of traditional theater. That’s my background, but I long ago tired of the limitations of psychological realism and conventional narrative. I can see why people from a visual arts background might find it less than compelling. But the world of Contemporary Performance has long since distanced itself from “drama” and practitioners of contemporary performance should be acknowledged for the work they do. Dancers and choreographers train for years, and continue to train every day, to master their bodies, enabling themselves to do extraordinary things. They deeply explore the nature of movement, the way bodies moving in space convey different meanings and experiences, point to different ideas. Directors work with dramaturges to develop intellectual frameworks around the experiences they create, around how to integrate the visual and auditory experience with the performance, how does all this point to ideas beyond the performed event? How does the physical representation of ideas on a stage or at a site loop back to the concepts with which they are engaged?

One difference, I think, is that time-based artists working in contemporary performance frequently think about, as Goldberg puts it, “What kind of feeling do you want people to have?” – something that is new to visual arts practitioners. This may seem like a mild distinction, but it is key. Performance practitioners are experience-makers, not object-makers, and as such they are concerned with human engagement. Directors, choreographers and other performance-makers may be engaging with making manifest the inner life of human beings, defining the space between audience and performance as a shared field of intersecting subjectivities. And this means that we’re not only talking about thoughtful, detached examination of intellectual ideas, but, sometimes, feelings. This is where it gets tricky because what makes Traditional Theater so abhorrent to many is the unseemly focus on feelings and emotion. I’ll admit, I think there is nothing more awful than having to sit in a theater and watch some actor “act” the words of a playwright who is blatantly and unsubtly trying to evince an emotional response from the audience. In this day and age the provocation of an emotional response that doesn’t feel obvious or unearned is exceedingly difficult, and artists who are able to do this effectively are few and far between.

That being said, if a visual artist is making work in the context of creating objects for sale, it does not seem like a stretch to suggest that the framework of objectification will translate into the practice of visual art performance. In the visual art context, the body is an object to be manipulated like any other, or it is a canvas upon which the artist can project their desired meaning. If that body becomes more than object, it complicates the essential aesthetic transaction of the visual art experience. The attribution of feelings and emotions to a human being creates the possibility of empathy, moving the body from a field of abstraction into one of subjectivity. [Note: while discussing this essay with a friend of mine I was directed to the work of German philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer and his study of hermeneutical aesthetics. I am only starting to research it, but it is brilliant, fascinating and relevant].

The Abramovic installation at the MOCA Gala appears to have been, based on after-the-fact accounts, objectification taken to its extreme, with human beings serving as literal centerpieces at the dining tables of the wealthy and privileged. From what I understand from performers’ accounts online some were subjected to mockery and ridicule – for instance, a pile of salt arranged like a line of coke in front of the immobile performer – and generally put in an unenviable position. I’m sure that some of the performers had a very different experience, and only those who were in attendance can speak authoritatively, but from my perspective the premise itself borders on disgusting while being emblematic of the values of a hyper-capitalist art market.

So in brief – I am proposing that visual art performance, generally, is predicated on the objectification and abstraction of the human body, whereas contemporary performance – Time-Based Art with its origins in dance and theater – is more frequently predicated on the creation of a subjective field of experience – what I will call “experience design”. The aesthetic challenges of integrating light, sound, visual representation and embodied presence – sometimes even text – into a Gesamtkunstwerk are undertaken not to create a “living object” but to create a shared experience.

So while both visual art and performance contexts rely on the vision of an artist, the path to the desired end result is different. The visual artist comes from an object-making context and approaches their work under that influence, whether by embracing or rejecting that paradigm. Contemporary performance, more often than not, actively acknowledges and celebrates the essential ephemerality of the form. The artwork exists only in the moment in which it is perceived, the audience has a role in the creation of the work itself, each performance and expression is unique depending on who is there to experience it. No two performance events are ever alike – and that is part of the beauty of it. Contemporary Performance events are rarely thought of as objects for sale, or as advancing an artist’s ability to create objects-for-sale. Maybe that should change – that’s a longer discussion for another time.

I will also propose that the practice of art-making in visual art performance versus contemporary performance is reflective of the object vs. experience framework. Performance, even from the most dictatorial choreographer or theater maker, is essentially a collaborative process. In order to bring a performance to life one requires the collaboration of directors, writers, composers, dramaturges, actors, lighting designers, set designers, technicians, programmers, videographers, choreographers, dancers, etc., etc. Visual art making is less frequently like that. Traditional visual arts practice is that of an artist alone in the studio or a master artist overseeing poorly paid laborers hired to fabricate objects under their direction. This method, I surmise, translates into visual art performance, where the same practices hold. Rather than collaboration, there are workers engaged to implement the singular, exacting vision of the artist. So we see a fundamental divide in both the practice of art making and in the theoretical constructs surrounding the creation of any given work. Yes, there are artists working in spectacle-oriented performance – Robert Wilson, for example – who are notoriously dictatorial and exacting. Never having been privy to Wilson’s practice I can’t say how collaborative he may or may not be. But I would imagine that even he must work responsively to the input of his co-creators.

Obviously this is a vast generalization. There are visual artists working with food experiences, community-engaged practices, etc. who defy the framework I’m suggesting. My concern is that for those visual artists engaged specifically in the making of “performance”, the disdain for craft and the disinterest in artists already working in contemporary performance not only results in subpar work being celebrated by the arts market and visual arts infrastructure, but continues the ongoing devaluation of contemporary performance from dance and theater makers.

This is a complicated issue – one which is far too much to fully engage here. Kaprow-style “happenings”, Chris Burden being shot, etc. are experiments in “the real” that become more problematic when “re-performed”. Nina Horisaki-Christens explores this idea in a recent essay in the ICI Journal where she discusses the Visual Art world’s discomfort with “script”. She says:

In his recent musings in Artforum on the future of Trisha Brown’s work, Douglas Crimp posits that her signature solo Watermotor, as performed by Brown, is a masterpiece. He then follows up by inquiring, “Will it ever be danceable by anyone but Brown?”  The question is not so much will it be danced by anyone else, as Crimp was likely aware that it would inevitably be performed by another at some point, but would it be danced as expressively and imaginatively by anyone else other than its maker. In Performance Art this seems to be the crux of the question of authenticity: can the work reach its full potential, retain its essential meaning and character, when performed in a different context or by a different individual?

It is such an interesting – and flawed – paradox. I saw Watermotor performed by Neal Beasley last spring at DTW (now NYLA). It was beautiful and extraordinary. Was it the same as watching Trisha Brown do it herself? Probably not. Does it make it any less authentic? Not in the least. Here is Deborah Jowitt on Beasley in Watermotor:

In 1978, with Watermotor, Brown unloosed the inborn wildness that her earlier plain-jane structures had been reining in. You can see her dancing the solo in Babette Mangolte’s black-and-white film, projected on the DTW lobby wall. Galloping, twisting flinging her limbs into moves and countermoves, she’s a marvel of ribbony obliques; this dance could pass through the eye of a needle. It’s fascinating to see the terrific Beasley perform the piece. He’s a small, muscular man—supple but taut. His Watermotoris less about cool liquid than about molten metal that has to be worked fast before it hardens. There’s no accompaniment but the sound of his breathing. The virtuosic performance lasts about two-and-a-half minutes, and we cheer. Beasley calmly rode Brown’s bronco of a dance and didn’t fall off.

I would suggest that Visual Art’s obsession with authenticity has less to do with respecting an artist’s original intent and more to do with an inherited predisposition towards protecting ownership. Once again this is a larger conversation than can be explored fully here and now. (Maybe someone will give me a grant so I can study this more deeply. LOL.)

The larger point I’m making is two-fold. First, visual art performance, because of its object-based origins and the field’s obsessions with “the real” and “authenticity” rejects craft and discipline. This is problematic because, frankly, it results in a lot of very bad performance. Second, because the visual arts world has a value-creating infrastructure, this bad performance is more highly valued in the marketplace than Contemporary Performance by time-based artists with origins in dance and theater. Performance work that is more sophisticated, thoughtful, challenging and virtuosic is de-prioritized and devalued in favor of unpracticed – but “real” – performative events created by visual artists.

There was a time when both visual art and performance valued craft. Times have changed. Experimental artists in both disciplines are uncomfortable with artifice, reject the obvious falsity of “psychological realism” and seek new modes of engagement with the public. The problem is that they do not share knowledge or even dialogue around their respective practices, aesthetics, goals and strategies. The Visual Art world has no incentive to value contemporary performance, because their work will remain remunerative regardless. Though I would like to see more visual artists reach across the fence to time-based artists and engage them in a collaborative process, I’m not optimistic. If that is not going to happen, then it is time for Contemporary Performance makers to actively re-contextualize their work and for the arts infrastructure to develop strategies for creating value around experience design. Curators, administrators, critics and artists must work together to create a value-appreciation structure that will situate performance predicated on experimental dance and theater in the wider arts world, and identify ways to either leverage or recreate the visual arts model.

Unfortunately I don’t have the time or money to go to grad school or take any of these curatorial workshops like ICPP or ICI, and as I jokingly said before, it is unlikely that I will get some kind of grant to actually research and write on these topics. I’m just a working stiff who has had to figure this out myself as I go along, self-educating as I go. This is only predicated on my life experience, not book learning. Like Michael Kaiser says, I’m just an amateur who needs to be properly instructed by the anointed Brahmins of High Culture. So who knows? Maybe I’m totally wrong. What do you think? What is your experience either lived or studied?

Please discuss in the comments section.

Popularity: 29% [?]

It’s been a busy week here at Culturebot! The season is in full swing and we wish we could clone ourselves to try and cover all the work that is gracing NYC’s stages! This week was a pretty eclectic group of shows starting with the raw, hallucinatory ramblings of D.J. Mendel and concluding with the sleek and sculptural “Connected” from Chunky Move.

Tuesday night took us to The Bushwick Starr for D.J. Mendel’s “Dick Done Broke”, directed by Dan Safer.  While waiting for curtain time I was talking to Sue Kessler and Noel Allain, ED and AD respectively of The Starr, about the show. Mendel first performed “Dick Done Broke” in 1999 and has had this notion of revisiting it for awhile – or perhaps revisiting it every ten years to see how he (and the piece) have changed. Noel and D.J. had been talking about working together and this came up, so they decided to do it. Noel was understandably thrilled about working with D.J. - Mendel is kind of a downtown legend, an iconic actor and reliable presence in Richard Foreman’s work and countless other productions, he brings a kind of sinister, threatening, serpentine but thoughtful and complicated masculinity to all of his roles. You kind of expect him to have a career like Paul Lazar or Eric Bogosian – original, quirky and unexpected downtown artists who carve out a career as character actors sans pareil in mainstream film. Time will tell!

“Dick Done Broke” is a slippy stream of consciousness ride through the mind of an extremely inebriated working class Joe, face-planted on the floor of a bar looking back wistfully at his youth, wrestling with his present and staring down a bleak future. The performance takes place on a platform (maybe 10×12?) suspended from the grid by aircraft cable that is swinging in perpetual motion, pendulum-like. It is above a field of empty liquor bottles. I’ll be honest – after a while it was kind of hard to watch, it alternately made me seasick and sleepy and I have no idea how Mendel managed to stay so incredibly focused while in constant motion. It definitely gave me the feeling of the kind of borderline-blackout wasted state of mind that the character was experiencing.

The writing is reminiscent of early Sam Shepard, memories flow seamlessly into philosophical musings into seeming nonsense, creating a vivid, hallucinatory effect. The character muses on his broken-ness, physically, mentally, emotionally. He has a certain amount  of self-awareness and a bruised psyche that wryly reflects on his condition without swerving into self-pity. Mendel delivers the monologue in a gruff but surprisingly nuanced torrent of words, pausing occasionally to let the imagery to sink in and then diving back into the narrative with force and passion. From time to time he stands up on the swaying platform, struggling to stay on his feet, simultaneously conveying his drunkenness and the precarious mental state of the character. At one point he even rolls over to take a piss off the back of the platform, which is both hilarious and pathetic. Towards the end of the show Mendel steps off the platform and steps around it, dodging it in motion, barely escaping collision. It is a very suspenseful, and funny, sequence that brings the show to a poignant yet elliptical confusion. Our hero will go on, he must go on, but it isn’t going to be easy or pretty and he’s not going to have any self-realizations that will change him as he stumbles into the future.

Jay Ryan’s lighting and Daniel Bernard Roumain’s sound score flesh out the actor’s presence nicely, creating a moody world of bars at closing time, of that horrible moment of drunken realization – “Oh My God! You’re All Ugly!” – exteriorizing (is that a word?) the inner state of the actor. Under Dan Safer’s direction all the pieces come together seamlessly. While I wouldn’t say “Dick Done Broke” is covering any particularly new territory story-wise or thematically, the collective talent of the collaborators and D.J. Mendel’s performance makes it a compelling, intriguing hour in the theater.

Wednesday night took us to BAM for Phantom Limb Company‘s “69 Degrees South” – a dream-like multimedia meditation on Shackleton’s journey to Antarctica. I first met Jessica Grindstaff (who, along with partner Erik Sanko are Phantom Limb) at The Tipping Point, a conference convened by the British Council, The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the CUNY Institute for Sustainable Cities to bring together artists and scientists to explore issues around climate change. I subsequently saw the re-staging of their breakthrough show The Fortune Teller at HERE and their collaboration with Ping Chong, The Devil You Know. Sanko’s puppets are really incredible, beautifully made and fascinating to watch. He’s also the founder and leader of the band Skeleton Key, a fixture in the downtown music scene in the mid/late 90′s and continuing through today with a heady sound of rock-based avant-noise sound texture songs. Grindstaff’s set design is imaginative and transporting.

“69 Degrees South” brings Sanko’s marionettes together with his Skeleton Key  project and adds collaboration with The Kronos Quartet, choreographer Andrea Miller, director Sophie Hunter, video by Shaun Irons and Lauren Petty, costumes by fashion house threeASFOUR and a host of other top-notch artists and designers to create a multimedia dreamscape that is visually stunning and sonically multi-textured.

Narratively the show is a little bit lacking, and those expecting to learn actual facts about the Shackleton Expedition will be disappointed. (For that, I would recommend the film Shackleton’s Antarctic Adventure, which I saw at the Imax theater at the Baltimore Science Center. It’s probably okay on a TV but was awesome in Imax!) For instance – it is kind of hard to tell from the show that all of Shackleton’s men survived – which was a miracle – instead the returning presence of a death skeleton puppet gives the impression that they are lost.

“69 Degrees South” probably works best if you imagine it as a kind of immersive, non-linear, music video-type experience. The sound – both live and pre-recorded – is really great, it moves seamlessly from Skeleton Key to Kronos Quartet, the live mix is complicated and multi-dimensional, you’re constantly asking yourself  ”Where is that sound coming from?” and “Is it live or recorded?” The video is massive – frequently covering the whole stage – and, thankfully, is deeply integrated into the overall aesthetic. Grindstaff’s set design, that includes three towering icebergs, is clean, cool and stylish, well-complemented by the lighting design. And the actor/puppeteers do a great job in their various roles.

If anything the performers and puppets are underutilized. The music, video and staging kind of overwhelm what could have been a very central, humanizing, component. As a result the project overall feels somewhat distanced and abstract. The marionettes don’t do much more than walk around, I found myself wishing that they were doing more. Having seen what Phantom Limb has done previously, I was hoping that the marionettes would play a more pivotal role in this show. There were a few moments that suggested the humor and depth that could have been more richly explored, including an interlude between a seal puppet and Shackleton.

Also, if I didn’t know that Phantom Limb had actually gone to Antarctica for research and to do field recordings (that were incorporated into the soundtrack) I probably wouldn’t have been aware of that dramaturgical element.

Overall I found the show to be beautiful, meditative and mostly enjoyable. There were some stretches where my attention wandered a bit and I would have liked to have seen more use of the marionettes, but I definitely applaud the ambition and scope of the project and appreciated the seamless mix of disciplines and media.

Thursday night took me to The Kitchen for Maria Hassabi’s SHOW. This piece harkens back to her 2007 piece Gloria at PS122. Once again she is collaborating on a duet with Hristoula Harakas, once again she is exploring a series of posed situations and glacial choreographies. In this latest iteration she has changed the context, bisecting the space of the Kitchen to half, removing the seats and creating a more gallery/”happening” type environment. The audience enters the space and waits a good ten minutes before anything happens. In the empty space with a bunch of lights on the floor in one half of the room, we endure the now all-too-familiar experience of being abandoned to our own devices. People chat amongst themselves and then start to look around the room expectantly. Then everyone quiets down, waiting. And nothing happens, and everyone starts looking around again, and you can almost hear everyone thinking the same thing, “Is this the show? Are they really going to leave us here on our own for an hour? I mean, it is called “Show”? Maybe she’s making a statement about show?” And just when you think you’re totally fucked, Maria and Hristoula enter and strike a pose in the middle of the crowd.

Over the course of the next 70 minutes or so, they move through a sequence of postures and movements, alternately staring fiercely into each other’s eyes or deeply into the audience, face to face. The first sequence, which was basically a duet, a glacial descent to the ground, was riveting. The dancers created tension in and between their bodies, inciting an air of expectancy. We watched as they slowly descended, muscles taut, legs and torso extended, subtly twitching under the strain, in deep concentration.

From there the piece moved on to explore the same basic idea, in different variations. For me the most compelling parts were when the two were in (silent) dialogue with each other. They really have a deep rapport, and they’re both intense performers. When they were moving closely together, either in mirror or variation, there was a tension and subconscious communication that you could almost tap into. When they moved apart and to different areas of the space, that tension and connection seemed to wane, it was harder to maintain focus and my attention wandered. My experience of the work was alternately fascination and boredom. I appreciate the demands on my attention, the way I was being asked to focus on the minutiae of motion, the subtleties of interaction and the feeling of tension and expectation. But over the course of the hour I also felt fatigued and frustrated, waiting for something more to happen.

The sound design was very atmospheric – it sounded like it was just a recording of a crowd of people in a lobby waiting for a show to start. For a moment I thought that was what it was – that they had recorded us in the lobby of the Kitchen prior to the show and were playing our own ambient noise back to us, which would have added an interesting meta-layer to the experience. But I don’t think that was the case.

UPDATE: THIS WAS IN FACT THE CASE. SOUND DESIGN WAS LOBBY NOISE RE-MIXED. Matthew Lyons from The Kitchen says:

Alex Waterman, the sound designer, takes a recording of the first few minutes of the piece when the audience enters the space.  That gets played back into the house and he re-records that playback with the room sound.  And then that gets played back into the house and re-recorded, over and over till the end of the piece.  So the original few minutes of the start of the piece gets muddier and muddier with the new sounds on top of each playback.

Very cool!

I really loved Joe Levasseur’s lighting – it was incredibly  bright and clean it almost seemed hyper-real, as if it added a dimension of extra clarity to my vision. As I looked at the dancers and, when my attention wandered, at my fellow audience members, it was as if I could see every hair on someone’s head, every line on their face, every subtle flex or twitch of a muscle. I don’t know if it is possible to create increased visual clarity through lighting design, but it sure seemed like it. The only element I kind of disagreed with was the ending. I’m not going to say what it was – I don’t want to give it away – but it is actually a pretty familiar and obvious thing and I was surprised that she used it. I mean, it makes sense, but it sort of undercut the previous hour’s worth of experience.

I like Maria’s work. While her choreography is pretty out there, she definitely pushes the body into interesting and unexpected directions. She asks compelling questions about the meaning of the observed body and about the dynamic and expectations between audience and performer. That doesn’t mean I always love the experience of the work – like I said, I alternated between fascination and boredom. But it is well worth checking out.

Friday night I went to the Joyce to check out “Connected” by Chunky Move at The Joyce. I’ve really enjoyed Chunky Move since I first saw Tense Dave at DTW back in 2005. Their subsequent work that has been shown in NYC has always been forward-thinking and compelling, so I didn’t want to miss this opportunity. Especially because this is the last piece created for the company by founding artistic director Gideon Obarzanek, who will be leaving at the end of this year to be replaced by Anouk Van Dijk.

“Connected” is an interesting piece. Where Glow, at The Kitchen in 2008 involved direct interface between a dancer and digital technology, “Connected” places dancers in juxtaposition with a kinetic sculpture created by California-based artist Reuben Margolin. At the beginning of the piece there is a duet on stage right as other ensemble members complete the construction of the sculpture/machine on stage left. Once it is complete it begins to undulate, lift and transform – manipulated by strings attached to wheel and operated by the dancers. Eventually the dancers remove the string and the sculpture is operated by the movement of the wheel on its own.

As always, the choreography is both complex and clean. The dancers make it look simple and easy, but as you look deeply at their movements, you find yourself discovering all kinds of nuance and subtlety, as they weave together elaborate movement sequences into one unbroken chain. They’re beautiful dancers and bring presence and muscularity to the choreography. As they work in concert with the sculpture/machine you start to meditate on the meaning of “hand made” – the role of human imagination and technical dexterity on the manipulation of the natural world. Since the sculpture moves in wave-like, undulatory patterns, it almost looks like a physical manifestation of a digital rendering of some architectural structure. Knowing that it is wood and string creates a sense of wonder and mystery. And the ending tableau was really striking.

The lighting was clean, simple and elegant, matched by a similarly environmental sound score. The overall effect was of a well-integrated work of art, where sculpture, movement, technology and mechanics came together in one extraordinary living aesthetic machine.

Mostly I found myself fascinated and delighted by the interplay of the dancers with each other and with the sculpture. Sometimes it was hard to focus on one specific thing and I found my mind wandering. That could be as much a result of show-going fatigue as anything else, though.

It is playing tonight and tomorrow. Check it out if you can.

Popularity: 9% [?]

Maria Hassabi is always adventurous and exciting. Whether creating work inspired by the performance aesthetics of fashion or challenging the very meaning of dance in her collaboration with Robert Steijn, Hassabi can be expected to upend our expectations.

On Thursday through Saturday, November 3–5, The Kitchen presents SHOW, Hassabi’s new evening-length, installation-based performance. SHOW features performers Hristoula Harakas and Hassabi, sound design by composer Alex Waterman, lighting by Joe Levasseur, and a set designed by Hassabi in collaboration with visual artist Scott Lyall, who provides dramaturgy for the work along with artist Marcos Rosales.

Performances are at 8:00 P.M. with an additional performance at 10:00 P.M. on Friday evening, at The Kitchen (512 West 19th Street). Tickets are $15.

I read the description of the installation/performance and still have no idea what it will be. Sounds immersive/interactive and, possibly, unsettling. We’re seeing the show on Thursday and will report back.

Popularity: 5% [?]

PLAYING WITH CINEMA — AMERICAN PERFORMERS EXPERIMENT WITH FRENCH FILMS

Saturday, October 22nd
6:30pm
120 min
The Invisible Dog Art Center
With: Miguel Gutierrez , The National Theater of the United States of America, Annie-B Parson, Dan Safer

Hosted by: Melissa Anderson

Co-presented with The Invisible Dog Art Center and Les Subsistances

American artists will use a few minutes of a French movie (Godard, Tati, Demy, Melville) as the basis of their performances, experiencing the tension between images and bodies on stage and questioning the affinities between the imaginative world of movies, and the imagination of a performer.

What kind of relationship can a performer have with an image on stage? Moving pictures can have an intense presence and catch the eye, and even compete with the physical presence of the performers. The performers then have to deal with it, either through appropriation or rejection: pictures on stage impose some form of negotiation.

Tickets: Free
The Invisible Dog is located at 51 Bergen Street, Brooklyn 11201 New York

Popularity: 5% [?]

This looks really interesting:

On Wednesday and Thursday, October 5—6, The Kitchen will present a performance by A.Bandit, an experimental performance art group featuring Los Angeles-based visual artist Glenn Kaino and magician Derek DelGaudio. Titled Experiments from The [Space] Between, the show mixes magical experiments with elements of music, film, and video. A.Bandit will be joined by collaborator DJ Rhettmatic and special guest China Chow.

Derek DelGaudio (L) and Glenn Kaino (R), photo by Christie Hemm

Forming an unusual alliance between art and magic, A.Bandit explores what “imaginative space” is and could be, and how to create it. The duo will lead the audience through a series of hybrid performances that double as exciting and challenging artistic propositions. The show opens with a large-scale illusion piece that Kaino and DelGaudio first performed at Art Los Angeles Contemporary. From there, the night proceeds onto magic trick-laced works like The Mistake Room, The Tyranny of Vision and more. The night concludes with a special appearance from actress China Chow.

A.Bandit is an experimental performance art group consisting of conceptual artist Glenn Kaino and magician Derek DelGaudio. Formed as an extraordinary alliance with the intention of creating a new medium somewhere between art and magic, A.Bandit has performed their psycho-spatial interventions at venues like Soho House in Los Angeles, Art LA Contemporary in Santa Monica, and LA/ART Annex in Hollywood, where they have taken residence for six months, operating their “conceptual magic shop” called The (Space) Between. For more info visit www.abanditship.com.

Popularity: 2% [?]

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% [?]

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% [?]

This week, Brazilian artist Michel Groisman opens up PS 122′s first “homeless” season as the First Avenue space is renovated. Occupying the Invisible Dog Art Center in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn, as well as some nearby locales, Groisman will present what amounts to a retrospective covering his career. Among his best known works, Transference (pictured above) will be presented Thurs. and Fri. and Door of Hands on Weds. and Fri. (tickets $20/$15). Additionally, Groisman will be presenting three other works which are not only free (with reservation) but, in two cases, family-friendly: Octopus (Sat. 5 & and Serve Yourself (Weds., Thurs. & Sun.). Additionally, on Saturday afternoon Groisman will be staging Lois Weaver’s Long Table “experimental public forum” at the fantastic bar 61 Local.

Groisman is currently on tour across the US, and while performing at Portland’s TBA Festival (where Claudia La Rocco reviewed Transference, duly impressed), he took the time to answer a few questions for CBOT.

Your work is often referred to as “Action Art” and you’ve often been presented at art museums and galleries. I’m wondering, do you see yourself coming at this work more as a visual artist or as a performer? Or is it a false distinction?

Difficult to answer your question because I have a very eclectic training: I studied painting and music for many years, and also for some time now I have been dedicated to research and meditation with the body. I have developed both individual performances and collective proposals for experiments open to the public (which, somehow, has left me quite close to an educational approach). So what actually happens is that depending on the context where I am, I consider myself in a different way. For example: when I’m with dancers, I usually consider myself as a visual artist, but when I am among visual artists, sometimes consider myself a musician, and so on…

As you prepare your work for different spaces and presentations, how does that affect it? The greater intimacy of a smaller space, or being the sole focus of the audience’s attention as opposed to being one work in a gallery space?

The work Porta das Mãos [Door of Hands] is essentially a game of touch two fingers of one hand and two fingers of the other, and discover different ways to make possible movements with your hands without disconnecting these fingers. I started this search so casual, and was moving forward, curious where it would arrive. This research has captivated me for several years, holding my hands for many family lunches. Over time, I tried different ways to share work with people: to show a one person at a time with my hands, showing the pictures of my hands in the format of an exhibition of photography, projecting my hands in large architectural spaces and in small spaces.

However, experimenting with different ways of showing the work, I realized that more infuence my relationship with the public was not so much the external space, but my interior disposition during the presentation. I realized that, depending on my interior disposition, it could happen I feel distant from people despite being in a small space, or to feel close to the public even in a large space …

One of the things I see happening in your work in various ways is this idea of “transference.” In the piece of that name, you use flows of movement to light candles strapped all over your body, transferring the flame from place to place. In Serve Yourself, the audience is included in the process, and this time it’s transferring water from strapped on cups. What does this mean for you, or how does it play a role in your work? Are you interested in the concept itself, or is it a technique used to reveal something about the body as it moves this stuff around?

Somehow, I think the “transference” is a consequence of the connection. In the performance Transference the fire moves from one candle to the other from the connection between a body part and another. In Sirva-se [Serve Yourself], the water passes from one person to another from the connection between one person and another. Another possible word would be: “Communication,” which can happen in different ways, verbal and nonverbal. And there’s also the question of “flow” that occurs through the connection between people. I am interested in investigating this question of the connection/communication, both at the individual level (to communicate and connect with myself, as in a performance), and the collective level within the interactive proposals. And if this research is fun (putting glasses in the body, for example) then it is even better!

Another thing, related to the previous, is this idea of intimacy. Not only is Transference revealing in terms of you showing us your body, but in Serve Yourself and Octopus and A Long Table on Proximity, the audience is actually part of the exploration. What interests you about breaking down that barrier between performer and audience, and what do you hope to accomplish doing so?

Yes, it 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. In my experience, I realized that the exercise of thinking about things, sometimes distance myself from the things themselves. 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. On the other hand, I also realized that this direct contact with the audience helped me a lot to overcome some personal obstacles.

Popularity: 3% [?]