"a fragile son": Matthew Rogers solos at JACK

Dance artist Matthew Rogers
Below: performing a fragile son
(photos: Nika Brunova)

Startlingly clear images from a fragile son--a solo performed by dancer-choreographer Matthew Rogers at JACK--have lasting power. I can attest. I woke up in the middle of the night, and they were right there, in my mind, complete and fresh.

There's something nondescript about Rogers himself. Take the fair, wispy, wayward tresses that, at times, blur his delicate, Southern white guy features. But, lit by Tuce Yasek, he can bring things into focus and bury them deep in the mind even as they retain their enigmatic nature.

He opens by first trotting up to a riser opposite the audience and telling us a few things about his family--related to Thomas Jefferson on his granddad's side; the men marked by a rare genetic disorder that thickens their palms and limits their fingers' flexibility. That "son" is part of the title implies we'll likely be dealing with father-son stuff, and "fragile" points to some sort of fault line.

Before the piece began, Rogers personally handed each of his watchers a copy of a missive that begins "Hlelo Dad," nearly every word containing misplaced letters. It's written to a long-absent father, ultimately an act of taking account of, and responsibility for, his own life and happiness.

Some of the indelible imagery involves a thick rope drawn out straight across a diagonal, a rope like an orderly measurement of time, the unfolding of a path. Then rippled, wriggled, lashed, its oscillations invoke a rodeo act, expert and--since we are so close to the performer in this intimate space--a little unsettling at times. Whistling through the air, the rope also calls up images from slavery.

There are also cords, the red of blood and undeniable bloodlines, sometimes stretched between Rogers and an audience member willing to hold an end. Sometimes Rogers wraps himself in the grip of a cord then unwraps his body. It is a slight, wiry body with sufficient knowledge of itself to be deliberate and surprisingly graceful; to tumble hard and flail loosely; to bound up steps as nimbly as "Bojangles" Robinson; to offer itself up as a blank sheet for audience members to mark; to be naked and fragile.

In the genesis of a fragile son, there might have been some work around a literal father, or a lineage of fathers of fathers. But the piece moves in less than literal space and, if you will, can take in the whole idea of place and home, the whole idea of heritage, the whole idea of white patriarchy and masculinity, and what it means to be a body, a mind and a spirit moving in and out of orbit of those ideas.

A few years ago, Rogers uprooted himself from his familial roots in Virginia and his more recent dance roots in New York--dancing in the work of major artists such as Tere O'Connor, Ivy Baldwin and Pavel Zuštiak--and relocated to Slovakia and Germany. Traces of that relocation and possible struggles around it move through a fragile son.

Curated by Stacy Grossfield for her Images//Landscapes series, a fragile son continues through February 12 with performances tonight and Saturday at 8pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information and tickets, click here.

JACK
505 1/2 Waverly, Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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Zuštiak's apocalypse now

Dancers of Palissimo in Endangered Pieces
all photos © Jeff Woodward

We seem helplessly drawn to dark visions of apocalypse in our art and even our entertainment--perhaps because, as a species, we've done so much to seed and hasten it. Or perhaps it is because we face down doom not only on a planet-wide scale but in every private life and, potentially, in every personal moment of those lives. In Tarot, the image of the Wheel of Fortune turns without cease, bringing the high and mighty to the depths and raising new victors who, themselves, will be supplanted.

The world premiere of Endangered Pieces, a trio by choreographer Pavel Zuštiak of Palissimo, occasions these thoughts.

As the audience files in, the open, raw mainstage at Abrons Arts Center reveals a naked man (dancer Jaro Viňarský) lying face up and motionless on the floor. Electronic music (by collaborators Christian Frederickson and Bobby McElver) fills the air with a dense, chugging texture. Three tall metal poles with heavy bases have also been toppled. A gate of corrugated metal rises just high enough to show us the shins of a second dancer (Matthew Rogers) and then to allow the choreographer to emerge and pull a lighting cord from its socket.

In this stark, industrial environment, Zuštiak and Rogers go about with expressionless, workman-like calm, standing up the poles and attempting to keep the corpse-like Viňarský on his feet. Each time they raise him and release him, he softly slips to the floor. They flip him vertically, horizontally, sling him over Roger's shoulders, drape him over Zuštiak's thighs like Jesus of the Pietà, only face down, ass outward. In these moments and throughout the hour-long piece, Joe Levasseur's eccentric lighting enhances a dreamlike, even Daliesque feeling, adding at least one or two extra dimensions to the 3D of moving beings that sometimes do not resemble humans like us.

Behind the metal gate, the wall of a recessed area has been covered in short planks of wood snuggly fit together and warmly lit. One or another dancer will sometimes enter this modern cave then slip from view, but its shelter is not long for existence.

Voiceover material instructs us to "imagine the last man" and to question what he does and "Does he even understand what he is doing?" A lot of imagining went into the powerful look and sound and performance of this piece. If it sometimes drags (as during the "let's just experiment with all these planks from the busted-up wall" segment), it also sounds an unavoidable alarm.

See Endangered Pieces at the Abrons Arts Center Playhouse. Remaining shows: October 4-5, 10-12, 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Abrons Arts Center

466 Grand Street (corner of Pitt Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

O'Connor's "Rammed Earth"

I relished the chance to return to Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth (2007)--which I'd first experienced at The Chocolate Factory last autumn--with its dozens of chairs that, for the initial section, spread audience members throughout the performance space, each chair facing this way or that, set in its own eccentric inclination. Against the ushers' gentle suggestions, I kept my well-stuffed messenger bag (on my lap, where it would not get in the way of any dancer). And in accord with a (perhaps not so gentle) suggestion that O'Connor once offered dance critics some time ago--a suggestion I clicked with straightaway--I left my notebook and pen stowed deep in the recesses of that bag where they would not get in my way.

I remembered what it felt like to inhabit the same space as Rammed Earth, with its high-pitched, mysterious poetics and its wide-open possibilities of meaning, and these masterful dancers--Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams--so weirdly good they make my skin crawl. This time, in the Howard Gilman Performance Space at Baryshnikov Arts Center, it felt as if we, the audience, were being buffeted and shaped by those four powerful bodies and intelligences.  Make that five, not four; of course, O'Connor shapes us, too, as architectural elements in his environment and as nervous systems that cannot help but fire up in such a charged setting.  

More than any other, this dance explicitly reminds me that a work of dance seen more than once is never the same, that it alters and is altered by the giver and by the receiver, and that there's always more there than can be grasped on first glance or easily told. I cherish this dance without needing to figure it all out. And even those things I think I do know about it are things that I'm just as happy to silently nod at and leave alone.

See Tere O'Connor Dance in Rammed Earth, now through Sunday, with two shows per evening: 7pm and 9pm; no late seating.

Baryshnikov Arts Center

450 West 37th Street (between 9th and 10th Avenues), Manhattan

Ticketing at Ticket Central or 212-279-4200