Will Rawls: Shuttling between "downtown" and Serbia

Dance artist Will Rawls

In 2008, I went to the Balkans for the first time and, in some ways, never came back. It was also the summer that Obama was running for president.

The Planet-Eaters is a choreographic investigation of folklore to encounter ourselves as different kinds of performers who are neither here nor there, neither expert nor amateur, both singular and plural, both ancient and new.

--Will Rawls, excerpts from program notes for The Planet-Eaters

In the exceptionally elegant body of American dancer Will Rawls, the folkloric dance rhythms and rituals of the Balkans reveal a lush complexity. Rawls and his musical collaborator, Chris Kuklis, duet in The Planet-Eaters: the dancer entering the realm of music via a twisty, vocalized system of counting beats and his pulled-up posture and lighter-than-air trotting, prancing, pivoting; the musician sharing physical space and elaborate movement and even aggressively manipulating props. Both men go where they "don't belong," and they do so heartfully and beautifully.

With the few audience rows forming a broad crescent curved around one long side of The Chocolate Factory's performance space, and the dancers getting particularly rambunctious in the latter part of the work, you might say there's even community involvement in all this. Come expecting a solo dance turn by a star of the "downtown" arts scene--a strange expectation here, since folk dancing is a communal kind of thang--and you actually become part of a highly textured fabric of witness and support. And then there's the matter of your own feet and the way an eventually sweaty, panting, slip-sliding Rawls might ram right into them. And Kuklis? At one point, he flaps and thrashes a huge patch of Astroturf in your general direction. It gets to be a hot mess up in there--especially when everything takes a turn into a cross between house culture and Old Europe shamanism--assisted by Saša Kovacevic's fanciful costuming--in a suddenly darkened space. About the only weak link is Rawl's lengthy spoken word passage in the middle of the show; the narrative is intriguing, but his voice could use more oomph.

with lighting by Bessie Award winner, Madeline Best

The Planet-Eaters continues through Saturday evening: SOLD OUT. For complete information on this program, click here.

For information on future presentations at The Chocolate Factory, including Jon Kinzel's Someone Once Called Me A Sound Man (December 4-7), click here.

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

horribly good

oh, the horror of it. what madeline best and shawn irons and lauren petty and brian rogers have put together. called the horror the horror (I have plenty of energy to drive over there). if it drives you to abrons arts center tonight or tomorrow, i truly hope you get in. not too many seats there and what they have of them all up in the balcony, confined to its central section, so you get this awesome (a word i don't use reflexively) panoramic view down into the stage and across the first panels of walls to either side of the stage where video artists irons and petty splash their stunningly beautiful, alternately hypnotic and hallucinogenic imagery. rogers’s soundscape first lures you into a perfectly reasonable environment of road traffic and bird song then snares you the way a really nasty, grasping dream can do and, before you know it, you’re wondering if you’re hearing the passing roar of one of those 9/11 planes and later you’re recoiling from that mel gibson rant, you know, where he berates and threatens oksana and calls her everything but a child of god, only rogers has electronically manipulated this already scary thing to the extent that the madman’s pants and exclamations come out like the unearthly rasp of the beast outta hell. and then there’s best, who goes from being this slight, perfectly ordinary, pleasant-looking young woman drifting across the stage to this try-brid--simultaneously, a shadow, a live creature and a huge, lipsticked, thrashing head video-projected in this environment of creepy/violent sound and sight, transformed from second to second. all of this plus a heartstopping visitation from rachmaninoff. it's genius.

the horror the horror (I have plenty of energy to drive over there). See it tonight and tomorrow night at 8pm. Tickets.

Abrons Arts Center
466 Grand Street, Manhattan
(directions)

Dance theater as dark art: "PURO DESEO"

Back in April, my colleague Andy Horwitz (of Culturebot) reviewed luciana achugar’s PURO DESEO when it premiered at The Kitchen and called it “several kinds of awesome.” I usually try my damnedest to avoid that word, but--damn it--Andy got it right. Achugar has delivered a work that should define the experience of awesomeness in dance theater. She and her creative team went on to win a 2010 Bessie for it, much deserved.

Having missed the Kitchen season, I grabbed the chance to catch up with PURO DESEO during Ben Pryor’s innovative American Realness festival at Abrons Arts Center.

The first thing that got me was the gutsiness of starting it off in darkness and keeping the audience visually locked down for a very long time, with just achugar’s sing-song voice rising from the far side of the audience, repetitively singing a Spanish lyric, her faint tone slowly intensifying from folksiness to a slightly more strident pitch, and then the sound of something heavy passing me in the aisle, pounding its way towards the stage. Lighting designer Madeline Best is several kinds of gutsy, too. When we’re finally permitted to see, she lights the playhouse’s raw stage to suggest some dank, fire-lit cave of the mind, one you’d do well to avoid.

Thoughout the hour-long piece, achugar and collaborator Michael Mahalchick roam that mysterious, unholy space like ritualists gone quite mad. Awkwardly swathed in heavy black drapery and elbow-length leather gloves, achugar shuffles, shuffles, shuffles, retracing her steps along a proscribed, diagonal path and turning her head to give us an impersonal, unseeing, chilling stare. Best’s lighting later picks out Mahalchick writhing on the floor like a beached walrus. The piece proceeds with solo segments and interactions between these two looming figures in a Gothic atmosphere where desire looks less than pure.

In one lacerating achugar solo, Best brutalizes our eyes (and nerves) by frantically switching light on and off. Eyes simply can’t adjust that rapidly, and it hurts, though achugar, repeatedly slamming herself onto the floor, is surely hurting more.

Another disturbing segment finds achugar flat on her back while Mahalchick, making wizard-like gestures with his arms, works her splayed legs as if by remote control. In another sequence, the two run through a long, striking series of strong, precise gestures of the arms and hands. As the pace of this gesticulation increased, I felt myself slipping into a trance I did not desire and twice had to yank myself back. Powerful stuff.

The sophistication of that ritualistic sequence--both as theater and as, well, a dark art--conflicts with apparently artless elements, such as when achugar, for no discernible purpose, rattles the metal gate at the rear of the stage. That noisemaking doesn’t add much...and yet it works...doesn’t work...works...doesn’t work. Oh, hell, I don’t know. It’s hard to settle one way or the other on this, and yet it seems very achugar, very much about simply throwing something at water to disrupt its surface.

PURO DESEO runs for just one more performance at Abrons--tomorrow, Sunday, at 5:30pm. Hurry for tickets!

Abrons Arts Center
Henry Street Settlemen
466 Grand Street (off Pitt Street), Manhattan
(directions)

Rogers and Best: select your memory

Selective Memory–presented by Brian Rogers of The Chocolate Factory at The Chocolate Factory in Long Island City–achieves a most eerie intimacy with its audience. To witness it feels, at times, as if one has fallen into what one is watching and weirdly exchanged places with or fused with performer and multi-faceted creative collaborator Madeline Best.

The roughly 50-minute performance takes place in flesh and blood–Best standing before us, nearly motionless or making slight, generally uninflected movements–as well as in projection of her image upon two screens (set design by Brad Kisicki). The first screen, hanging down like a shower curtain, traces a curving shape in the space, a little like the Greek letter omega lying on its back. The second screen is a narrow rectangle suspended several feet in front of the deepest inner curve of the omega.

Rogers sits to the left of the space behind a Mac, a panel of audio controls and a table-top keyboard. Best–wearing sensible shoes and a navy blue dress with fussy tiers of fabric–enters the space and stands just within the curtain’s curve. She’s holding something in her right hand that appears to be a remote control of some sort, but you’ll rarely catch her using it. Swirling sounds and faint voices are heard. Lights dim.

Best takes a few steps, centering herself deep in the curve. The sounds intensify–a shrill rumble, an indistinct voice. Her face appears on the front screen. A faintly-troubled hush embraces this quiet face with its blinking, sensitive blue eyes framed by straw-colored shoulder-length hair and bangs. Slight, almost imperceptible shifts of her head can be detected the more one looks and looks and looks for long stretches of time. And so, with this most minimalist of minimalist choreography, Rogers begins his campaign of snaring watchers. Did you catch that minuscule twitch? Will she suck up her lower lip one more time? As she makes this next shallow pivot, will she suddenly break out in something a little less subtle, more macro?

It’s amusing to imagine someone thinking, “When will the dancing happen?” This is the dancing.

The face on the screen creates an illusion of Best being closer to each one of us that she could possibly be. And, as you think about it, you realize that’s because she strongly resembles a viewer looking out at a performer–expressionless, curious and expectant, perhaps suspicious, perhaps not daring to make a move, suspending the next breath. Best looks like your neighbors in the row, and like yourself. What, then, is she doing there? But this passes once you think about it too much.

You can imagine all kinds of things that could be happening. You can populate this stripped-down place with a multitude of effects and beings and meanings. That would be your memory, selected. Or you can leave it alone.

Rogers brings up a warm buzz or hum and, later, a short, melodic loop as the screen zooms in on a detail of Best’s face from the lower reaches of her bangs to just below her nose. Her eyes–always watchful, though placid--search us out as she shifts in slow motion. The encounter is hypnotic and an endurance trial. A new development–she turns, and we see the back of her head on the screen–seems like a major advancement in a story we still cannot identify, a new chapter. A close-up of her left ear and cheek and chin feels like a punctuation mark. But what was that sentence?

The thought returns: We’ve been motionless, expressionless, silent, blinking as we stare out at Best--as into a mirror-covered object–for close to 45 minutes.

The screen shows us a close-up of the collar of her dress, her chin, her lips. A real-time projection of her appears on the curtain behind her, just to the left of its center seam. (A new dimension!) In short order, we see multiple shifting, drifting Bests populating the space, only one of them made of flesh and blood. The finale–green, serene and dreamy–seems like it should be a breakthrough but feels unreal, surreal and definitely elusive for the flesh-and-bloods sitting in the seats. Best slips away from us, vanished by the devices that brought her to us and, perhaps, brought us to ourselves.

Selective Memory

Wednesdays-Saturdays, through September 18 (8pm)

The Chocolate Factory

5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City, Queens

#7 subway to Vernon/Jackson Avenue

Information and reservations