Can you just clear it up? I need a little more clarity. -- Peter Richards in Para-dice (Stage 1)
When Patricia Hoffbauer auditioned for DTW's Fresh Tracks series, she says, David White argued that her dance was too messy and disorganized. But my guess is that mess is often the point. Because either you're going to have a tidy piece of work or you're going to have a real piece of work (meant in both senses of that term). Hoffbauer sees everything in terms of the mess.
And what she has going on now at Danspace Project--a phenomenon called Para-dice (Stage 1)--is messy to the max on purpose. Sprawling throughout space and time, it doesn't even have a discernible beginning or a definitive end. And oh, that middle!
Add the fact that Para-dice (Stage 1) is messily shoehorned into an evening with another phenomenon called The Adventure (instigator: Trajal Harrell), a nightly sample of choreographic research experiments-in-progress and, on the evening I attended, a thought-provoking party game for audience members followed by an invitation to stick around for wine. What's going on here?
If narrative is power, is there any coincidence whose narratives are visible? -- Patricia Hoffbauer in Para-dice (Stage 1)
What seems to be going on is a kind of blasting open of assumptions about what it means to make and perform dance, what it means to try to give a lecture on dance and culture (with Hoffbauer and collaborators vividly referencing and mercilessly deconstructing Brazilian history, pop culture and stereotypes), what it means to consume art, what it means to critique it or to willingly live with it and participate in its meaning. It complicates everyone's safe story--and just what does it mean to have a crush on a smooth-singing, smooth-looking samba/funk star who turns out to have been an informer for the dictatorship devastating your country?--and it continuously interrupts "serious" art with entertainment and vice versa. And it does all these things with an almost unimaginable seamlessness and insouciance.
One of my favorite moments happens very early on: There's a smallish film screen set up on one side of the space, and some hazy imagery comes on for just a few seconds before the images inexplicably slide away onto the back wall of St. Mark's Church's sanctuary. Why in hell should the images stay on a little screen when they can more rambunctiously, even sacrilegiously, splash themselves, as in a movie theater, across far more impressive space? This filled me with cheer, and the oncoming dance--riddled with graceful humor among other good and smart and skillful things--kept me alert throughout.
The piece was created in collaboration with its performers--Peggy Gould (so deft and pleasurable to watch in her duet work and other interactions with Hoffbauer), Elisa Osborne, Peter Richards (whose visual contributions include samples from Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha) and George Emilio Sanchez (responsible for much of the text). Costumes are by Liz Prince, lighting by Kathy Kaufmann.
Every performance includes a different work from The Adventure. (Last night, for instance, dancer Anna Whaley "stole" Thibault Lac's solo, 2, Line, Science--simply constructing a sandpainting-like diagram of white powder on the church floor and dustbusting it up again, all to the strains of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine.") So go and see what adventure's in store for you this weekend.
Patricia Hoffbauer's Para-dice (Stage 1) and The Adventure
continuing tonight through Saturday, 8pm
St. Mark's Church
Second Avenue and Tenth Street, Manhattan
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