Some quick impressions of four highlights from this season's
Fresh Tracks showing at
Dance Theater Workshop:
Goodbye Mr. B (
Lindsay Clark in collaboration with the performers and
Reid Bartelme; performed by Clark,
Yve Laris Cohen and
Stuart Singer): By far, the standout piece of an interesting evening. There's a sense of artistic assurance here--a calm mastery of space, light, sound and the energies of the body. Simple, clear, formal design is the best container for driven passion when "
a tornado meets a volcano," as Eminem would say. You want to see this one so you can say you saw it when Clark goes on to rule, and rule she will.
EGO (by and for
Marjani A. Forté): A reverberating, hallucinatory score (by Everett V. Saunders) forms the perfect sonic matrix for this vigorous, kaleidoscopic solo on an edge where assertion of self (or, really, the eruption of multiple selves) meets aggression. You'll note that Forté has learned well from Blondell Cummings, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar and Camille A. Brown, distinctive artists with whom she has worked. But what's especially convincing here is that she never loses control of the physical shapes or the impression she's making. Never. Never ever.
Duke (
Yve Laris Cohen, in collaboration with
Michael Mahalchick; performed by Cohen, Mahalchick, J
oey Cannizzaro and
Niall Noel): This is the second piece I've seen by Cohen;
the first, presented at Dixon Place, also featured this transgender-identified, multidisciplinary artist with a bared chest, matter-of-factly revealing surgical scars beneath what was once female breasts. That work, as it unfolded, was forged in ritualized pain and endurance. This current piece adds a Sisyphean task for Mahalchick--a fleshy bear of a man who repeatedly clasps the small, boyish Cohen around the torso and ports him, and the heavy plank of wood he's carrying, from one place to another until the exertion of this labor becomes clearly audible and palpable. There's more to this piece, but this very long, repetitive section is, in a strange way, dazzling...and grueling...to witness. And frankly I long to chain a certain
New York Times critic to a seat and,
A Clockwork Orange-style, force him to watch it over and over and over again.
Jessica's Story (by and for
Rebecca Patek): I don't know how I did it, but I seem to have spaced out and missed a lot of the original media frenzy around the Jessica McClure story--18-month-old Texas girl falls down a well and is later rescued, to great fanfare, in Reagan's America. I guess I just ignored it. But Patek wore me down anyway with her her pathologically unassuming manner strangely wedded to a wacko presumption to speak for "America's baby"--now 24 and a mother--who, according to Patek, refuses to have anything to say about this bizarro episode in her insanely famous toddler-hood. (Why,
the nerve of her! Forcing Patek to create this dance!) A kind of brilliant video backdrop gives literal and archetypal context while temporarily overwhelming Patek's live action. Nevertheless, this satire stands as one of the daffiest, wickedest creations I've ever seen at DTW, and there's something downright admirable about that. It really should be the last piece presented under the historic DTW name. Really. Truly.
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