Horwitz looks at "Blessed"

A great piece from Culturebot's Andy Horwitz:

Meg Stuart “Blessed”, belatedly
by Andy Horwitz, Culturebot, February 12, 2012

And here is my own review, posted January 13: Didn't it rain: Meg Stuart & EIRA at NYLA

Didn't it rain: Meg Stuart & EIRA at NYLA

I felt wary when I first read that Meg Stuart and EIRA's 2007 work, BLESSED--now running here for the first time at New York Live Arts--had a big rain effect and some kind of Katrina connection. But I needn't have worried. This work escapes exploiting New Orleans' tragedy by being so over-the-top in its imagery that when it finally breaks like a violent fever, it leaves you feeling cool, cleansed, grateful to have come through.

For Blessed's stage set, Doris Dziersk has crafted a simple environment of heavy cardboard--a lush palm tree, an oversized swan, a small enclosure furnished only with a cardboard chair and a large shopping bag. Francisco Camacho (of Portugal's EIRA), dressed in a white jacket and slacks, moves around this space as if made of cardboard, too. Angular, two-dimensional, he strides like the animation of a figure off an ancient Egyptian artifact. Eventually, he retreats into the shelter, sitting sideways and staring motionless as rain starts to fall from the flies.

The drops fall a little at first; then comes a copious downpour that lasts and lasts. Over the course of the piece, about 75 minutes, rain will come and go over the cardboard set and special platform floor with an impressive naturalness to its timing, varying intensity and lovely mistiness. It reminded me so of several days straight spent in Arthur's Pass on New Zealand's South Island watching or ducking heavy rain that, now and again, would tantalize me by slowing down for a hot minute.

The presence of water in the design and/or execution of dance--Pina Bausch's rapturous Vollmond and Elizabeth Streb's cheeky STREB: Kiss the Air! are recent memories--can be exciting or fun. But the rain effects in Blessed transcend all that. You can clearly, rationally eyeball the overhead, artificial mechanisms that produce these showers. But shift your gaze just a bit lower, and the showers themselves look so natural that you're suspended in a state of imbalance and wonder. ("I'm in a theater." vs. "I'm not in a theater." vs. "I am SO in a theater!" vs. "I am so NOT in a theater!") And that's a good place for artists to hold an audience.

The deluge, of course, wears down the palm tree, the swan, the humble shelter and, eventually, the mind as the wizardly Hahn Rowe's layered soundscape, like the weather, alternates between eerie, mesmeric atmospherics and aggressive overtones. Camacho himself transforms--at first, colorfully, even resourcefully--then becomes shattered, sitting amid the mushy cardboard debris with a horrible brace distending his lips into a grotesque grimace. He hallucinates a Mardi Gras dancer (Kotomi Nishiwaki, whose carefree prancing over the wet floor in high-heeled boots should get her a Bessie). He also appears to hallucinate a stylist (Abraham Hurtado) with an amusing supply of costumes and confetti.

Blessed's final passage moved me because Camacho's body and his dancing, by that point, had loosened. I don't think this is a dance about New Orleans; no one can really encompass what happened to New Orleans. Blessed is about dwelling in one's rain and becoming human.

With dramaturgy by Bart Van den Eynde; costumes by Jean-Paul Lespagnard; lighting by Jan Maertens.

Blessed, by Meg Stuart/Damaged Goods and EIRA continues tonight and tomorrow, Saturday, with performances at 7:30pm. There will be a post-show talk this evening, facilitated by Trajal Harrell.

For information and tickets, click here.

New York Live Arts
219 West 19th Street (between 7th and 8th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

Meg Stuart lays it out on the table

I hope Meg Stuart and Performa 09 will not mind my quoting a bit of the promotion for Auf den Tisch! (At the Table!) which I attended, last night, at the Baryshnikov Arts Center. It's really the best way to get the concept right:

Picture this: you enter a room and can take a seat at an enormous table, with four microphones at the ready, as if in a conference situation. From your chair you can see how the table becomes a platform for action and reflection. Or something of the kind. You see performers sing, play, dance, and talk about performance issues, fragility, and territories. Or not. Meeting and improvising at an oversized table such as this one, it is no wonder that things get out of proportion. “Auf den Tisch!” (At the Table!) is a curatorial improvisation-project by Meg Stuart. Upon her invitation and initiation, a changing cast of performers, thinkers, writers, musicians, actors, and dancers confer about their pressing issues while presenting a performance of negotiations.

If you manage to get a reservation for tonight's final performance (7:30pm), you too can witness--or, as you wish, more directly participate in--this conference of sorts.

The table--a huge, blond wood beauty with a couple of unimaginatively used trap doors--is a total performer magnet. Who wouldn't look at this spacious, brightly lit thing and want to clamber on and act out?  Combining the likes of Stuart, David Thomson, Yvonne Meier, George Emilio Sanchez, Trajal Harrell, Keith Hennessy and others, you certainly have the makings of a major act of acting out. Audience folk sit to table with the performers or occupy a few rows of chairs that ring it. As Stuart settles down in front of her microphone and gazes around the room, there's a sense of something momentous about to happen.

She starts by reading text. It sounds sensitive, fragile and quiet, a kind of table-like base for what will follow, and might represent Stuart's essential nature as the dreamer and generator of the entire project. The performance I saw contained a repeating motif of a heavy body or bodies piling on top of or rolling over a body underneath. Stuart's opening words are followed by other voices around the table that accumulate and spill over one another, swelling, eventually subsiding.

Stuff happens. Lots of it. Anything can happen, since improvisation is in the room. Thomson, dressed in a comic-strip hoodie and jeans, prowled the

space between table and outer chairs. Later, he was the first to bust out dancing, top and center, in loose-limbed, splayed-out movements.

Meier--challenged by Stuart at one point-- retorted, "I'm sorry. I'm not sitting on my mouth." Someone, to clunky effect, alluded to the Fort Hood shooting: "I'm still stuck on the psychiatrist with a machine gun. Was he improvising?"

A parlor game broke out, and the possible fucking of pineapples and righteous politics of pineapples were contemplated. Thomson and Harrell engaged in a cross-table Q&A about forgiveness. A belligerent Janez Jansa somewhat reluctantly performed the history of Richard Schechner's "putting off of clothes." This "getting close to history" made Meier at last "sit on her mouth."

The spectacular "Floral Cat"--the spectacular Hennessy in costume--touched off a segment of leftover Halloween shenanigans. Sanchez--in a kind of Soupy Sales act flipped upside down and turned psychological--encouraged all of us to take a piece of paper money from our own wallets and simply rip it up. Amid more scampering, a few words were carefully added to a flipchart and just left there, meaninglessly, until someone gave the equally meaningless order for the flipchart to be flattened to the floor.

There were dashes of chemistry, untethered patches of the jazz of delicious movement (Thomson, Harrell) and wide-awake humor (Sanchez), and not a little mystification and diminishing returns. The performers seemed unwilling to acknowledge signs that energy and interest had dropped. What I had been told would last "maybe a little over an hour," stretched towards two hours before, having had more than enough, I rose to leave.

You have to know when to push back from the table.

At that point, Stuart, having just asked the audience if it had any questions, was answered by a heavy silence. For an interesting moment, we were left with her standing rather defenselessly before us in all her original sensitivity, fragility and quiet. Okay. Matters could have ended there, and quite reasonably.

But then, Performa founder and director RoseLee Goldberg took the mic and asked something on the order of "Do you think improvisation is still alive?"

I'm not really sure what she was going for with that question but, in light of the overall lack of surprise, challenge or revelation in the performance, I'd rephrase the question, maybe split it into two parts:

"Do you think there's still life in your improvisation?" and "Can improvisation still matter?"

Performa 09 information and resources

Baryshnikov Art Center

450 West 37th Street, Manhattan

Stuart and Gehmacher reviewed on Dancemagazine.com

Click here to read my Dancemagazine.com review of MAYBE FOREVER by Meg Stuart and Phillip Gehmacher, which ran January 30-February 2 at Dance Theater Workshop.

BTW, Dance Magazine's site does not appear to offer a way to search for reviews by author or by date. From now on, I will try to remember to post a notice here whenever one of my reviews gets posted online or a review or feature is published in the print version. I've been forgetting to do this. However, if you'd like to see Dancemagazine.com offer alternative ways to access its archived reviews, here's the contact info.

"Really, really crotchety" and rather nice

I'll get as crotchety as my colleague, New York Times critic Claudia La Rocco has been lately--have you noticed?--if I get invited to one more interminable slumber party/temper tantrum like disappearing never-ending return (never-ending, indeed), a work directed by Charlotte Gibbons and created and performed by Gibbons, Christine Elmo, Noopur Singha and Anna Sperber at The Kitchen. Its two-evening run concludes tonight, and there'll a big advantage in not having a rainstorm to get through to reach it. Clarinda Mac Low is also on the bill, but her "Scottish play" rumination is a work-in-progress. So I will leave it alone, except to say that climbing into the aisles and sitting among the audience feel really over as performance strategies, and I wouldn't mention this except that there's an awful lot of that here.

Unruffling my feathers

Colleen Thomas has a lovely oddball show going at Danspace Project, also concluding this evening. Partake of this one if you love resonant, poetic images and lush, exuberant dancing. I want to list the dancers because it was a pleasure to watch them all: Julia Burrer, Ted Johnson, Karl Rogers, Joshua Knowlton, Samantha Allen, Adriane Fang, Jennifer Felton, Anthony Phillips, Joseph Poulson, Carla Rudiger and Nathan Trice.

Highly recommended and also closing tonight: MAYBE FOREVER by Meg Stuart/Phillip Gehmacher (with wonderful live performance by rock musician Niko Hafkenscheid) at Dance Theater Workshop. Good luck getting tickets, though. BTW, you'll be able to read my
Dance Magazine review of MAYBE FOREVER in...well, er, some month or another... Keep an eye out for it.