Ever spend time at Manhattan's Whitehall Ferry Terminal with its mass of humanity waiting to glide away to Staten Island? In its endless, shifting diversity, it's a fabulous place for people-watching and story-concocting. And with the renovated terminal's civilized amenities, you can have a nice little nosh, take a little pee in a clean loo, and come back to settle into your bench seat for another round of free entertainment. And that's even without periodic interventions by the
Lower Manhattan Cultural Council!
LMCC sure seems to love that space. I've now seen three LMCC-related productions there (two dances, one movement-oriented theater piece) and have come to this conclusion: The terminal's bright, airy, generous space must be pure catnip for choreographers and dancers. But it's also a singularly weird location because...well...all that space really allows your potential audience--who, after all, are there on a mission to catch a ferry to a bus to who knows what--really allows them to look through you and past you the way they could only hope to do if you were suddenly popping onto the #6 to annoy them with hip hop or doo wop or mariachi-merrymaking.
The latest artist to install his performers among the rather bored-looking folks waiting in the ferry terminal is the usually fascinating choreographer and sound designer
Pavel Zuštiak, director of
Palissimo, with his LMCC-commissioned
Halt!
Halt!'s trio of dancers include
Gina Bashour,
Lindsey Dietz Marchant and
Jeff Kent Jacobs, all wearing gold-toned sneakers--and that's an important detail to notice, since their otherwise rumply street clothes, generally affectless demeanor and initially schlumpy pedestrian behavior make them blend in with the milieu at least until it becomes clear that there's something going on here and you don't know what it is, Mr. Jones.
For any true pedestrian interested in directly engaging with
Halt!, Zuštiak and set designer Nick Vaughan provide a "sound bar" with headsets with one's choice of five soundtracks to flavor your experience of the dancing. I was issued my own, free-ranging pair of headphones and a slim audio player, which freed me to roam about and check out things from different angles.
However, as I gazed at my fellow terminal hangers-out, I wondered just how much of a real audience does this sort of thing create? Even when Zuštiak's mild ferry-terminal-tai-chi stuff turned into more obvious wow-some-strange-shit-going-down-here-who-are-these-nuts?, few people seemed to give the dancers more than a momentary poker-faced glance, and most did not glance at them at all.
It's somewhat interesting to make that observation about New Yorkers--how they don't really want to look, to get involved in anyone else's business, and mainly just have somewhere to go,
please god, without incident--but I wonder what that ends up meaning to the artists creating and giving a performance. I even wonder if most of these folks would identify what they were seeing as dance, or if--as is likely--they have an entirely different notion of what dance is. I also think Zuštiak would have done better to deploy at least three times as many infiltrators to make a dramatic impact in so large and distracting a space. That would have given him a fighting chance.
All that said, the reason I'm rather fond of the Whitehall Ferry Terminal for performances is because the pedestrian crowd makes a terrific set. It almost doesn't matter that most people are not (at least, consciously, willingly) involved.
Halt! is free, of course, and runs through this Friday, between ferry arrival and departure times each day, from 1pm through 5pm. Take the #1 to South Ferry or 4/5 to Bowling Green or N/R to Whitehall Street.
UPDATE
Pavel Zuštiak has sent the following clarification of the relationship of this work to two entities--the New York City Department of Transportation and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council:
New York City Department of Transportation presented Halt! through their new Urban Art Program. Lower Manhattan Cultural Council supported the project with funds from The September 11th Fund; public funds from the Manhattan Community Arts Fund, supported by the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs; and public funds from the Fund for Creative Communities, supported by the New York State Council on the Arts.
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