How strange: Melinda Ring's engagement at Danspace Project

Cast of Strange Engagements
(photo: Melinda Ring)

Strange Engagements
by Melinda Ring
Danspace Project
January 30-February 1

Dance fans flock to see some contemporary work like a dance version of that old quip: "I would pay to hear her read the telephone book!" (Yes, kids. Once upon a time, there was something called a telephone book, and some of us professed to be willing to listen to extraordinary actors reading it, page after page...oh, never mind.) There are dancers whose technical acuity and smart, sensitive presence make almost any work an occasion. Melinda Ring has the blessings of one such team for Strange Engagements, which ends its Danspace Project run this evening.

Laurel Atwell, Paul Hamilton, Rainey White, Sam Kim and Talya Epstein--lit in various degrees of revealing starkness or sedating cool by Kathy Kaufmann--start out in a sort of hunched-over huddle before activating silent space with quirky, stretchy, wrenching and swirling movement and sounds made by the slap of a palm or a foot on the floor or the occasional eruption of a few words. What Ring and her folks accomplish most securely, I believe, is our growing awareness of rhythm even when there's no audible music to guide us. Rhythm can be seen and felt even in the absence of the sonic impact of feet on the floor or the sharp clapping of hands.

This is an abstract journey with fine, strangely-engaging dancers--strange attractors, maybe, displaying clear patterns within what a lazy gaze might deem to be chaos--and that might be enough. However, I was sometimes vexed by Hamilton's deployment in all of this. He's Ring's only Black dancer and only male dancer--a tall, dark-skinned Black man whose showiest behavior in the piece looks aggressive and, at times, could be interpreted specifically as sexually aggressive. (You can't tell me Kim slapping him on the butt while he writhes over her is abstract.) Is this deliberate? Is it unintended and accidental? All I know is you can't put your one man, your one Black man, in a mix like this and surface movement like this and not expect it to raise a few eyebrows. I found it distracting because it made me pull away and start analyzing Hamilton's presence--a strange engagement, indeed.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (and Second Avenue), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Sam Kim's "Other Animal" opens at Danspace Project

Sam Kim
(photo courtesy of the artist)

Other Animal
by Sam Kim
Danspace Project
October 31-November 2

When entering St. Mark's Church for Sam Kim's solo performance of Other Animal, you'll be directed towards one of two sections of chairs or cute floor cushions, all in a straight line spanning the width of the floor, facing and perfectly aligned with the church's distant altar space. When I was there last night, a few people took seats over on the carpeted risers along the side of the floor, as you're usually permitted to do, but ushers quickly redirected them to this linear set-up. Eventually, Kim made her first appearance, and the reason for this control of our angle of view became clear.

Kim entered the space from one of the sanctuary's doors, dressed in leopard-print leggings, a long white shirt and a loose wool coat in a bold, checked pattern. For a quite lengthy stretch of her 50-minute solo, she merely sauntered, assertively strode or simply hastened across the floor, unconcerned about her watchers, repeatedly disappearing somewhere behind us and through another of the church's doors. In the beginning, I was curious to know what she was doing outside my range of view and tried to crane my neck to see.

Impossible. I turned my whole upper-back, discovering that she was actually leaving us. I didn't notice more than maybe one or two other people checking on what was going on behind us, and I think they might have been content to just hear doors close and re-open, to see Kim when she was in view, to watch her exit and return through the two visible doors facing us. I wonder how many caught that momentary apparition up on the right-hand balcony.

Now you see her, now you don't. What's that about? And do you care? Why should you?

Kim's own don't-care look and sullen demeanor (butchy, I thought) actually endeared her to me, and I began to care. I'm not sure why I would or if I should, but I did. She had won me over, and it put me in a very good place to appreciate how she went on to labor in, fill and ironically dominate the space.

Watching Kim's performance felt like finding oneself inside of a restless but also persistent, generative mind. The video animation work of experimental filmmaker Stacey Steers seemed to swell and spill from that same source--a thick, unruly blossoming of imagery, possibly organic but largely indecipherable, weird though inexplicably appealing. It bloomed in sections of the altar-area's wall, eventually overtaking its entire arch.

"I'm messy," her movements and way of being seemed to say. "Kind of beautifully messy. I'm here. I claim it. Sometimes staggering, sometimes slumping, sometimes soft of step. Holding myself together. Letting myself go. Slipping uphill (the altar risers) and rolling down. No matter how awkward it all looks, how difficult, how stop-and-start the effort."

A muted, warm pool of light sometimes draped Kim's body in the overwhelming space of St. Mark's Church like a gesture of compassion. That light also looked as if it might be seeping from within her, softly brightening wherever her body landed.

She passed me as she left the space for the final time, and I would have tipped my hat--had I been wearing one--to a masterful performer, secure in herself and her vision.

Lighting design: Kathy Kaufman
Sound and projection design: Chloe Alexandra Thompson

Other Animal continues nightly through Saturday, November 2, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

Danspace Project
131 East 10th Street (and Second Avenue), Manhattan

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DISCLAIMER: In addition to my work on InfiniteBody, I serve as Senior Curatorial Director of Gibney. The postings on this site are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views, strategies or opinions of Gibney.

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Much ado about...something

by Eva Yaa Asantewaa

Curator and artiste provocateur Tere O’Connor has given the City That Always Seems to Need One More Dance Festival a new festival in which choreographers start off with nothing–no concept, no music, no whatever–and come up with...something. (Funny, I thought that was the way it usually worked. In creativity, isn’t there always that moment right before the initial, germinating idea emerges?) This week and next, DTW’s showing The Nothing Festival (www.dtw.org for details and tickets) with work by Douglas Dunn, HIJACK, Sam Kim and Dean Moss (April 18-21) and Luciana Achugar, Walter Dundervill, Jon Kinzel and Susan Rethorst (April 25-28). On Saturday, April 21, DTW will host a panel discussion with O’Connor and the choreographers (1-4pm).

Opening night’s lineup included:

–the interminable but harmless and attractively danced Zorn’s Lemma, in which Dunn makes like a senescent, disoriented speedskater surrounded by fairies wearing wonderful Mimi Gross costumes,

–Colin Rusch and Angelina Jolie, in which the Minneapolis duo Kristin Van Loon and Arwen Wilder (aka HIJACK), two clever, technically-gifted women who regularly subvert all of that, get a lot of mileage out of and put a lot of mileage into a very different form of social studies class,

--Sam Kim’s Cult, a tedious duet for the choreographer and her collaborator Justine Lynch in which these two–check out that hair, those scary fake nails–appear to be having the sleep-over party from hell, and

–States and Resemblance, a work-in-progress (collaborators/performers: Dean Moss, Ryutaro Mishima and Restu Kusumaningrum) that is such an accomplished, elegant piece of art at this point that you have to ask what the heck more they think they need to do to it. Yeah. Seeing this one dance again is all I want to do right now.

(c)2007, Eva Yaa Asantewaa