Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.)  More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map/directions)

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Adventurous voices: Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell at Roulette

Odeya Nini
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Odeya Nini (l) and Gelsey Bell (r)
(photos courtesy of Odeya Nini)

When two barefoot wizards of vocal music sing you into sublimity, it's time to turn over for a nice, warm sleep. Unfortunately, last night, I had to leave Roulette, walk through the pre-spring chill and navigate the subway system. The charm of the final moments of A Solo Voice: Works by Odeya Nini and Gelsey Bell was, of necessity, followed by MTA charmlessness. But I will long remember singer-composers Nini (hailing from LA) and Bell (from around these parts) for their lovely efforts.

The collaborators presented a two-hour show with separate sets culminating in a jointly improvised piece, Spent Horizon, a kind of sonic woodland. Here their voices soared from opposite ends and levels of the theater, from balcony to stage, in birdlike call and response, overlapping and mingling, before the women slowly approached each other in an aisle, embraced and exchanged flyways as they drew apart.

This exploration of voice in trajectories of space is key to how Nini, in particular, wants us to understand vocal music. For her, as demonstrated in her 40-minute opening set, A Solo Voice, the moving body and the imaginative voice combine in a unified expression with elements of composition and improvisation. This carries the willing viewer and listener along through ethereal moments or ones that can pounce and grab and pierce. In other sections of this piece, Nini fills space with rich sampled sounds smoothly flowing into one another--some of this: bleating sheep, a creaking door, a whistler, gurgling water and what might have been eggs frying--and whirly tubes that simultaneously sing at varying pitches and make visible shapes in the air.

Bell's set, including four pieces before Spent Horizon, is cagey and fierce. Her combinations of vocal sounds can sound irrational with lines suddenly strangled or lyrics--briefly surfacing from her primal surround--that reveal disturbing histories. You come to suspect that even her melodic Now It Catches the Gleam of the might harbor something questionable underneath its honey-sweet and quiet, quiet, ever quieter repetitions. Those repetitions are a bit maddening. I'm thinking, Lullabye? Not so much. And, sure enough, there it is in Bell's program notes:

"Now It Catches the Gleam of the" was developed from my work with Gregory Whitehead on his radio piece Dimly Seen, which will air in May. Dimly Seen focuses on current American torture practices and uses the text of Francis Scott Key that was set in "The Star-Spangled Banner."

Click here to download Odeya Nini's debut CD, Vougheauxyice (Voice), released last April. Gelsey Bell's albums can be found here.