New work by Molly Poerstel at Gibney Dance

Scenes from Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings by Molly Poerstel
Above: Jennifer Kjos, Eleanor Smith, and Alice MacDonald
Below: Kjos and MacDonald
(photos: Scott Shaw)

Energy.

It's one of the things I love most about dance, whether doing it or being there to see it. Molly Poerstel's Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings would have great, great gusts of energy even if it were not for the unusual audience seating arrangements which expose the viewer to it. These arrangements expose the viewer, too, creating a heightening and unnerving effect.

The hour-long dance takes place in the theater at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center and tames that space by ignoring the customary rules of engagement. There's no front. Folding chairs for audience members are arranged around the floor of the performance area in a few single strands with small circles or clumps of chairs here and there, especially surrounding columns. You and your closet neighbor might find yourselves in chairs pointing away from a column at radically different angles, wondering how that's going to work later when, reportedly, there will be dancers and dancing to be seen.

Though dark and still somewhat heavy in feeling, the theater seems, if not airy, at least more encouraging of a flow of energy. You can well imagine a river of energy--or a real river--coursing through it.  It's a little bit nice but, as noted before, also exposing. You're forced to look around at everyone else sitting in their lines of chairs or their groupings, and you feel on display.

One of the secret little psychological perks about performance-going is that you're usually not on display. You sit back, and it's somebody else's show, somebody else's responsibility to make it all work.

Situating the audience inside the belly of the work, Molly Poerstel offers complex rhythmic structures and movement patterns in which forms calcify and disintegrate. Here, Poerstel gives agency to her performers as they unveil courageous bodies in transformation.

--from promotional material for Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings 

Being in that belly means you make decisions. You make mistakes. You make discoveries. Being in that belly means the likelihood of missing some courageous bodies in transformation--Jennifer Kjos, Alice McDonald, Eleanor Smith and, at times, Tara Sheena--because you're looking one way and don't see one or another of them over there doing her thing; or turning your head to catch someone way off to the side and wondering if you're supposed to be doing that; or tucking your feet out of the way of a surging dancer or two or three.

And, boy, do they ever surge. Yes, these bodies are courageous, sculpted by Poerstel--statuesque, monumental, Winged Victories sweeping through in rhythmic, repetitive flight or charge or leaping trot. At a certain point, the movement to Dana Wachs's music recalls Laura Dean's work with Philip Glass--driven, repetitive with striking variations and developments. Some of Mandy Ringger's lighting schemes remind me of dramatic museum lighting on a precious object, darkening everything that surrounds and could distract from the object of focus.

Poerstel's prelude melds creativity with basic carpentry--an apt way to set the tone for this impressive performance.

Are we a Fossil, and Of Facings runs through Saturday, March 12 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center

280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan

(map/directions)

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Won't stop: Jeanine Durning's new "To Being"

Jeanine Durning, Julian Barnett and Molly Poerstel
(photo: Ian Douglas)

With To Being we are asking: What is at stake? Where is the end? What does it take to stay in action? And how can we give more when we feel that we’ve met our limit? 

-- Jeanine Durning

When you're about to do what Jeanine Durning and her partners do in To Being, it's more than reasonable to ease your way into it. After all, what you plan to do will take force and stamina to a maniacal degree and, in excess of an hour, demand your complete mental and physical will. To Being--which just opened at The Chocolate Factory--requires something of the same from the empathic viewer. In the presence of these dancers, you might flip from feeling startled to feeling tickled to feeling absolutely spent.

Durning calls her process "nonstopping," and she first gave audiences a taste in her solo, inging (2010), where it was largely a phenomenon of the voice or "unscripted nonstop languaging," as she would have it. In the new work, To Being, Durning, Julian Barnett and an impish Molly Poerstel--accompanied by sound designer Tian Rotteveel--bring us nonstopping as disruptive acts of the body.

Audience seating is scarce and widely scattered around the edges of the theater's bright white space. You come in and take any chair. One or more of the performers might drift through, sometimes ambling by to say hello or give a hug to an audience member. And this amiable, apparent nothing-ing goes on for a while until the performers suddenly vacate the space, and one theater light fires up, signaling...what exactly?

In the absence of an immediate something, the audience's coughs and rustling amplify, and that stretches on for another awkward while. Then: a loud bustle from beyond the entrance, from the metal staircase. What?

From the moment the dancers burst through the entrance, they're on, violently, with little transition or drop in energy. If they were sounds--aside from their audible gasps--they would be blaring dissonance. They disturb the atmosphere with their jutting, threshing arms, lashing torsos, jabbing elbows. Being that refuses to stop.

One gets why Durning rejects the word "continuous" as a description of her movement qualities. That word indeed sounds too soft and flow-y. Nonstopping looks--feels, to the empath--like battle, like resistance to the very idea that you cannot do what you will to do.

As Durning wrote in her program notes, "nonstop points to the critical nature of what it takes to keep going in the midst of, and despite, questions, doubts, limitations, and, of course, inevitable failures." She came to this practice after many questions, some of them regarding why she continues to make work and if she should.

Objects in the way--a speaker, a tangle of electric cords, a radiator, a wall--are commandeered and roughly used, often to create flashes of sound. You sometimes worry for a dancer's safety; you always admire the currency of thought and commitment.

With lighting by Joe Levasseur

To Being runs through September 19 with remaining shows this week tonight through Saturday and September 16-19, all at 8pm. Durning will reprise inging Wednesday through Saturday, September 23-26 with 8pm performances. Remember, seating is very limited.

For information on both productions and ticket availability, click here.

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

Escalante and Poerstel double up for DoublePlus

Alex Escalante in Venado (Deer Dance)
(photos: Paula Court)

Alex Escalante's demanding solo, Venado (Deer Dance), feels sourced not only in his experience dancing with a Mexican folkloric troupe and not only in the ceremonial dances of indigenous tribes. It locates Escalante in a tradition of morally-focused, heroic performance that I associate more with modern dance than avantgarde dance since the Judson era. In the stark, dark setting at the theater of Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center, we watch this performer build from a quiet, humble entrance--circling the space while acknowledging each of us with an almost imperceptible smile and nod--to sculpted imagery suggesting trance states and hefty, majestic physicality. Jon Moniaci's very faint soundscape, which sounds like a crowd chanting in the far distance, gives a strange sense of temporal and even spatial depth to the experience of this dramatic offering.

Alex Escalante
below: Alice McDonald (left) and Mary Read
in Molly Poerstel's
Stolen Grounds (working title)
(photos: Paula Court)

Escalante shares a Gibney DoublePlus program this week with Molly Poerstel, both artists curated by award-winning dancemaker Donna Uchizono. Poerstel's new piece, Stolen Grounds (working title), might, in its own way, be as dramatic and demanding as Escalante's solo. It is a restive, driven duet for Alice McDonald and Mary Read in which the two women bound and churn through the roomy space, starting in near darkness, measured formalism grappling with chaos. If you happen to have a good angle on it, you will see the full lit image of a horse's head (artwork by Samuel Taylor) that looms behind one of the theater's columns; if not, you'll just notice an intriguing glow coming from that area. In either case, clearly this stolen ground is haunted ground.

Escalante and Poerstel continue tonight through Saturday with performances at 7:30pm. Friday's show will be followed by a Q&A with Donna Uchizono and the choreographers. For schedule information and tickets, click here.

Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis
Performing Arts Center
280 Broadway (enter at 53A Chambers Street), Manhattan
(map/directions)