Catch this now: A new, slow look at "Trio A"

Video installation of
David Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
at Danspace Project
(photo: Lily Cohen)

No to spectacle. No to virtuosity. No to transformations and magic and make-believe. No to the glamour and transcendency of the star image. No to the heroic. No to the anti-heroic. No to trash imagery. No to involvement of performer or spectator. No to style. No to camp. No to seduction of spectator by the wiles of the performer. No to eccentricity. No to moving or being moved.

--Yvonne Rainer's No Manifesto

Okay, no glamour, maybe, but I am completely seduced by the wealth of physical energy and concealed/revealed information streaming through David Michalek's slowed-down video interpretation of Yvonne Rainer's Trio A (1966), here and now at Danspace Project spanning three, large suspended video screens and performed by a succession of 46 soloists. Pat Catterson, a member of Rainer's Raindears troupe, coached performers in the tricky subtleties of Rainer's doing without DOING!  For example, if you reach down as if to pick a bottle from the floor, don't make much of it. It's just a bottle and just a reach. No drama.

David Thomson, one of 46 dancers
performing in Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA
(photo: Mark Kornbluth)

Anyone thinking Rainer's so-called pedestrian movement is, in fact, simple or easy will get a big ol' surprise from Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA and might even find a kind of virtuosity in it. (If you caught Michalek's original Slow Dancing, in 2007, at Lincoln Center Plaza, you know he knows from glamorous star power, spectacle...and s-l-o-wwwwnesssss.) But, for goodness sake, was Rainer's Trio A ever anything but engagingly focused, confident, exhilarating in execution? No way will she ever not be my anti-hero hero.

Michalek's SlowDancing/TrioA, presented in collaboration with Rainer, continues at Danspace Project tonight and concludes tomorrow evening. Both screenings are available from 6pm to 10pm. Viewers may come and go as they please and can also view Sally Banes' 1978 film of Rainer dancing Trio A.

Admission is free with RSVP recommended. For reservations, visit danspaceproject.org or call (866) 811.4111.

Danspace Project
St. Mark's Church in-the-Bowery
131 East 10th Street (at Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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Being.Here.NOW. with Pat Catterson

Moments of NOW.
(photos courtesy of Pat Catterson)

I love dancers, and I love dancing, and I find it meaningful and beautiful and spiritual.

--Pat Catterson

I do, too. All of the above. And if you feel the same way, you'd likely enjoy NOW., a challenging experiment choreographer Pat Catterson and Paul Galando conducted yesterday at NYU Tisch Dance and New Media, which Galando directs. Aside from being an experiment in bringing ocean-separated dancers together in real time via Skype™, it was simply an afternoon of lovely movement by seventeen skilled and lovely movers spanning time zones.

An audience member could freely move between and sit or stand in two studios--the second one divided into two performance spaces--to watch the simultaneous performances. Studio 1 held several monitors and a wide projection screen, and it hosted a series of solos, group movement sequences and a video of Catterson dancing the material. The spaces on the left and right sides of Studio 2 each had its own screen and hosted a series of duets.

"No one will see everything," Catterson noted. "But everyone will see all the dancers" over seventy minutes or so. "The seams will show. It's technology. The seams are part of the experience."

Technical seams did indeed show but, as far as I could see, not until late in the game with all seventeen dancers waiting to perform together in Studio 1 as present bodies or distant images. But by that time, I suspect, nobody begrudged a few glitches here or there.



In Studio 2, individually-performed duets overlapped in-studio dancers with onscreen folks from places like Buenos Aires and Amsterdam and Tokyo. The design was most often clean, open, like fine, sprightly lines on watercolor paper drawn in a confident hand. The energy was all in those lines, nothing overdramatic or extraneous, although perky playfulness (Aisha in Paris at 6:37; Macy here in New York at 12:37) or watchful curiosity sometimes sparked between duet partners.

In Studio 1, a glance and smile might bridge gaps between dancers of the ensemble. As each of Studio 2's duets concluded or were about to begin, one or another dancer would exit Studio 1's ensemble or return to it, giving a sense of the dance as a sprawling continuum continuously refreshing itself.

"I have an excellent memory, back to when I was three," Catterson said in the post-performance Q&A. "Past, present and future are one. The present is just one thing."

As a watcher, I could create my experience through my own movement in space--from room to room, from standing to sitting. It came to feel as if dance could be an everyday thing going on all day. I could be present for all without tiring.

If Catterson gets her wish, she'll find a museum willing to host NOW., and run it all day. Fingers crossed!

NOW. Dancers:

Irina Baldini (Amsterdam)

Gry Bech-Hanssen (Oslo)

Brynt Beitman (New York)

Mauro Sebastian Cacciatore (Buenos Aires)

Emilia Gasiorek (Copenhagen)

Pierre Guilbault (New York)

Sarah Haarmann (New York)

Gina Ianni (New York)

Tomoko Maeda (Tokyo)

Adele Nickel (New York

Maia Ramnath (New York)

Rodolfo Saraiva (Dortmund)

Sania Strimbakou (Athens)

Macy Sullivan (New York)

Asha Thomas (Paris)

Joshua Tuason (New York)

Maria Uppin (Tallinn)

*****

See NOW. today at noon.
NYU Tisch, 111 Second Avenue, 4th Floor, Manhattan

*****

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Murder, she danced

"Do you think you could ever murder someone?" asks choreographer Pat Catterson, with her brand new piece, There is No Conclusion. The story of a "true and unusual Lesbian relationship," this work is set to music by Elodie Lauten, Julia Wolfe and Pauline Oliveros.

Join Catterson and her company in this--uh-oh!!--audience-participation experience at Judson Memorial Church, Friday and Saturday, June 25 and 26 at 8pm.

Judson Memorial Church
55 Washington Square South, Manhattan
Reservations: 212-260-1834