jill sigman/thinkdance presents "Weed Heart" at Gibney

Jill Sigman in her performance of Weed Heart
and below with Katrina De Wees
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Unruly.

That word often crops up when we talk about weeds.

And about certain people.

I'll use it here to describe both the artist Jill Sigman (jill sigman/thinkdance) and what she has wrought at Gibney Dance Center: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center as choreographer and as Gibney's first Community Action Artist in Residence.

Her project, Weed Heart, is an unruly yet sociable thing of sculptured plantings, tea servings, soup servings, community conversations, free-ranging ideas, music and movement in intimate space. It willfully sprawls from Gibney's gallery lounge area to its tiny ground-level Studio A and, ultimately, beyond the center's front door.

Weed Heart is both a cozy, rather retro (think: hippie era) installation, a commons where anyone can drop by and hang out (the gallery lounge), and a performance where only a little over thirty onlookers can fit (Studio A). At the evening performance, those thirty or so get soothed by a weedy brew of tea, light and delicious red lentil soup made by Katrina De Wees and luminously textured electronic and vocal energy from composer Kristin Norderval. Seated in a single ring around the space, those thirty or so observe an abstract representation of the path that Sigman took--from earnest seeking and bewilderment to soul-felt awareness--as she sought to learn what common weeds can teach her.

How they communicate with themselves and, potentially, with us. How they survive. How they foster healing. How cultures have regarded and interacted with them over time. How our disdain for weeds parallels our similar ignorance about humans we consider to be unlike ourselves and less worthy.

Working with living creatures whose existence depends upon deep connection below the surface--or, at least, attachment to dug-up portions of earth--she has tapped into sediments of her family legacy and of New York history. Weed Heart is haunted by the displacement of indigenous people, the brutality of slavery, the appropriation of what was once land available for common access.

As Sigman reminds us, during a video in her performance, when we buy our sports bras next door at Modell's or park our cars in the lot east of Gibney, we do so over the remains of enslaved Africans. Yes, Weed Heart is packed with all of this--and more. Sigman works tend to be threaded with everything and every interconnection engaging her mind--from environmental sustainability to The Movement for Black Lives. It's a fertile mind, and you just plug into something that resonates with you and hang on as best you can.

Weed Heart, the dance and the dancing, seems born of age-old ritual. Here Sigman takes on the trappings of the plant kingdom. She has tied a large, heart-shaped Paulownia leaf around her face (and, much later, reveals its remarkable source). Brighter green leaves--and a little rose-pink rhinestone heart--decorate her dark-blue hoodie. One cannot look at that hoodie, somehow, and not think of Trayvon Martin's and--when her head and face are completely swathed--the Muslim hijab and niqab.

Sigman's movements--often angular, jutting and jarring--have an alien feel, and Norderval's soundscore draws us through metallic or insect-like dimensions that elude easy identification. It's the role of the ritualist, after all, to take us far from Kansas. Sigman does this, yet--with assists from Norderval and De Wees--she shows that "strange new worlds"--removed and hidden and strange and new to us, at least--can be places of graciousness and mercy.

Jill Sigman on Chambers Street
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Weed Heart performances continue through Saturday, September 10 and Wednesday-Saturday, September 14-17, all at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Related event: Weed Heart: People, Plants, and Social Justice panel discussion on Sunday, September 25, 4-5pm. Click here for information.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Jill Sigman's field of dance

In Jill Sigman's work, the art of dance and the greater world out there are not strangers to each other. Her choreographic and visual creations arise from inquiry into the nature of humanity's complicated relationship with and severe impact on our environment. Now last days/first field--her latest work, presented at The Invisible Dog through tomorrow evening--takes this connection a step further. This contemporary ritual brings the living world inside where it can no longer be ignored or abstracted.

last days/first field takes place on a long, rectangular space surrounded by audience on three sides; beyond the fourth end, composer-singer Kristin Norderval holds forth with her Mac and her ringing, exhilarating vocals. Sigman and several other women--Hadar Ahuvia, Corinne Cappelletti, Donna Costello, Sally Hess, Irene Hsi and Paloma McGregor--wear costumes made of an elaborate patchwork of fabrics and plastics. (Given Sigman's penchant for recycling trash for art, I'm guessing designer kymkym formed these constructions from discarded material.) Their movements suggest a massive, repetitive, accumulating process and arc of labor--forcefully mechanical, like threshers, and alert, assertively present in the space, clearly transformative. Since they surge and gallop so close to where we sit, we can't help but feel their strength. When they bind their legs to long, slender branches with rope and strips of cloth, reduced to rolling side-to-side, we feel life turned even more driven by that temporary confinement.

As they move, another dancer, Devika Wickremesinghe, circumnavigates the space, carrying boxes of little plantings suspended from a long tree branch or encased in pouches stitched into the front and rear of her gown. This elegant Spirit of Time slowly, very slowly, makes her way around as other dancers channel the dynamic inner processes of soil, roots and shoots.

That larger, outer world grows increasingly visible in the Invisible Dog space. The dancers construct perfect rows of rich, black soil and carefully plant little green seedlings along the ridge of these rows. Their tending of this field, along with Norderval's music, can induce serenity--as can the proffered cups of hot, sweet tea and the invitation to join little groups of performers, fellow audience members, farmers, educators and activists for a friendly chat.

jill sigman/thinkdance's last days/first field continues this evening and tomorrow evening with performances at 7:30pm. Be prepared for a roughly two-hour experience (sans intermission). For information and ticketing, click here.

The Invisible Dog
51 Bergen Street (between Smith and Court Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)