Strange characters invade Danspace Project

Michelle Ellsworth: The Pythagodress

At first, I wanted to bat Ellsworth away with a flyswatter. She talked a mile a minute and looked like she was about to jump out of her skin or fry herself from the nerves out. For god's sake, she wouldn't shut up! But how can you resist a crazy who's this brilliantly crazy--and entertaining to boot? Her solo is named for Pythagoras--yes, that Pythagoras--and for the voluminous Elizabethan dress that is far more than a dress, more like a prop, installation, fortress, way of life and numerological and metaphysical concept, designed by the equally brilliant Priscilla Cohan, Janice Lacek and Bruce Miller. I began to feel strongly protective of Ellsworth as her spindly, vulnerable fingers nervously wrangled with aluminum pipes and plastic buckles, snapping this piece to that piece, adjusting the extended dress into various functional configurations. But it became clear that she knew exactly what she was doing, had done this many times before. I detected in her a survivalist's terror beneath the wispy veneer of good cheer as the self-described problem-solver unpacked more and more of her hoarded supplies--everything from the expected (a roll of duct tape) to the bizarre ("a toilet paper roll that talks to me"--and, yes, my friends, it does--and a folding shrine to Martha Graham, complete with two white votive tapers). Her condensed, ineffectual recounting of The Odyssey, by means of a flannel board and cut-out characters, finally endeared her to me forever.

Andrew Dinwiddie: Farewell Tour

With neither the ancient KISS nor its Starchild frontman Paul Stanley on my radar, I had to do some Wikipedaling to remember exactly who Stanley was/is. If you don't know or don't remember, Dinwiddie's part-lipsynced, part-unplugged solo--another virtuosic impersonation from the man who gave us the supercharged Get Mad at Sin! in 2010--will remind you. Dinwiddie's character--a prancing id decked out in a thick, black, shoulder-length wig and facial hair and mask--utilizes and acts out the 2005 bootleg CD, People, Let Me Get This Off My Chest: The Very Best of Paul Stanley's On Stage Banter. Wielding his skull-topped wireless mic like a jester's baton and surrogate phallus, Dinwiddie manages to suggest both unbridled, expansive physicality and, because of the distant and distancing effect of the rock star's recorded voice and crowd noise, a certain ghostliness. (Stanley, like KISS itself, is still around, mind you, and even preparing to tour with Motley Crue, though the Wikipedia page notes hip replacement and vocal cord surgeries.) In the second, and rambling, half of this piece, set to a Chopin sonata, Stanley appears to go on mental walkabout. While I'm not sure what we're meant to make of this delicate passage, it's an interesting development, perhaps a spiritual one, and danced with care.

Andrew Dinwiddie and Michelle Ellsworth continue their shared evening at Danspace Project tonight and Saturday night, 8pm. For more information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(directions)

The DIY worlds of Peña and Ellsworth

Jillian Peña and Michelle Ellsworth--whose shared program at Dance Theater Workshop ends tomorrow evening--both incorporate new media aesthetics into their new pieces. Peña's MOTHERSHIP smothers us in vague, sterile New Age-y utopias created in virtual reality before our eyes and between our ears. In Tifprabap.org--which is a real Web site, not just the name of her piece--Ellsworth has devised an elaborate, and hilarious, religion that she alone professes, practices and defends against would-be critics or converts. Each piece runs about 30 minutes. Both are made by women. After that, things change dramatically.

Well, there is one more similarity: ambition. But that similarity is actually where these two works diverge.

For background, here's something from Peña's site:

I locate my video-based work within the dance community with the proposition that dance is an embodied shift that can exist without a represented body as its location. Casting the audience as subject and performer, I desire to generate a hyper-self-awareness in the viewers, who join the performance by gazing at their selves. This brings an instability of existence and agency to consciousness, but the sensation of it within a group might propose a way to transcend it.

MOTHERSHIP is, in fact, a virtual reality video spanning DTW's stage, flanked by two women moving, gesticulating and, at one point, changing costumes atop huge blocks that resemble the stone pedestals beneath Patience and Fortitude, the iconic New York Public Library lions. These sentinels also suggest the two distant towers in Tarot's traditional Moon card. Images of castles in the sand, water and islands, with the occasional howling dogs or splay of lightning, also lean towards that otherworldly association.

The lighting (by David Ferri) takes in the entire hall, not just these two live performers. The audience is lit in various, shifting ways, which makes sense in terms of Peña's statement, doesn't it? Her voiceover ranges from guided meditation to pornographic pillow talk to mindnumbing expressions of despair and loathing. She sounds like she's sometimes on and sometimes off her meds. She often gives directions to the audience but no one takes her seriously enough to follow them. For a few moments, a couple of women in hoodies show up at the top of the theater's stairs, and some of us crane our necks to see what they're about to do. Since they do nothing but stare before silently leaving, we soon turn back around.

Peña's vision is an ambitious one. So it's surprising that, when all's said and done, the actual reach of her work and its results seem so modest. But I was struck by a sense of emptiness at the heart of this piece--a sense of collapse at the core of everything that leaves a tenuous, shaky surface. There are so many uninhabited spaces. Where is everybody? Even the sentinels abruptly abandon their posts at the end. There is no proposal of transcendance.

And Ellsworth? That's her in the corner, choosing her religion, which she calls The Institute for Potential Religious Artifacts, Beliefs and Procedures. You can find out all--and I do mean all--about this "cult of one" at tifprabap.org. But you'll have more fun if you go see Ellsworth live, riding her ingenious saddle-pew and singing her hymn to the tune of the Gilligan's Island theme. She is clearly--by evidence of this intricate, involved and, yes, ambitious piece--The Hardest-Working Woman in Comedic Dance. In fact, I hope DTW (or someone) will be inspired to start a dance comedy series. Let's see who's really funny when the meager stuff that dance hipsters readily titter at go up against productions by the likes of Ellsworth.

Go tonight or tomorrow at 7:30pm, DTW.