born of capitalism: koosil-ja at The Kitchen

In i am capitalism, her new project with collaborator Geoff Matters, dancer koosil-ja channels the soul-absent soul of capitalism while nicking movement from The Rite of Spring and Brazilian Candomblé ritual. Four modest-sized video monitors, showing samples of this source material, anchor the corners of a barren, white rectangle of performance space. These monitors face inward towards the dancer, tilted slightly upward. From their distance and particular angles, audience members might discern little more than the general, outward relationship of source to koosil-ja's movements. One appreciates being in the same room with a living body performing this dancing. Technology is not everything. But these samples do serve to establish the dancer's authority: you see she has worked hard to get things right.

i am capitalism could be, among other things, an exorcism for self and others. By the end, though, you might not feel all that cleansed.

The piece--let me warn you--lasts a bit over two hours without pause. You will feel the entire trapping weight of that time, especially deep into the second hour when several potential--and desired--endings only serve to open up new stretches of material. koosil-ja insists in showing you--and showing you and showing you--how one person's world narrows, how darkness gets mistaken and substituted, in the mind, for light. She's brilliantly right, and we get it...and get it...and get it.

i am capitalism inspired, in me, a love-hate relationship. The love is for koosil-ja whose clear maneuvers in space command interest. Initially dressed like someone assaulted by her own asymmetrical costume, she seems less the sacrificial victim of the Rite or the anxious speaker of her voiceover text than a capable body rising above any circumstance.  She has beautiful carriage, and her churning propulsion from or shaping and rotation around this reliable axis is bracing to witness.

This is, however, the same person who eventually makes us want i am capitalism to shut down already. Or maybe it's the "psyche of capitalism"--irrational, delirious, at the crossroads of desire--that she makes us want to see crash to its finish. In any case, she works up to drawing the hate part of love-hate to herself like heat draws a heat-seeking missile. She's taking it on--victim and victimizer all in one, just as she says in her voiceover, how we become both.

How else to explain the completely maddening final passage? Here the choreographer, along with Matters and Melissa Guerrero, show up in over-sized, thin white hoodies with large paper iPod scroll wheels afixed to their solar plexus. It's like something a really bright kid might dream up for Halloween--the ghostees of legacy-model iPods. (Capitalism. Get it?) Obsessively tracing, eventually altering geometric tracks, the hunched-over hulks crisscross the floor--back and forth and back and forth and back and forth and--almost without cease as the clock ticks closer and closer to 10:20.

On opening night, some audience members made a run for it, taking unauthorized restroom breaks or simply heading out into the rain. And who could blame them for taking excellent care of themselves? Art can pull us into the artist's head. Hauled deep into koosil-ja's recurring nightmare of capitalism, which she insists in making our own, the viewer wants out--now!

With music by koosil-ja and Geoff Matters, percussion by Brian Chase. Video by Geoff Matters. Lighting by Ryan Seelig.

koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO's i am capitalism continues through Saturday, September 12, with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Kitchen
512 West 19th Street (between 10th and 11th Avenues), Manhattan
(map/directions)

koosil-ja in modern times

Gia Kourlas's New York Times review offers a comprehensive overview of Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image, and Algorithm, the new work presented by koosil-ja/danceKUMIKO at Dance Theater Workshop. I agree with Kourlas's assessment that koosil-ja's execution of an ambitious technological concept fails to cohere and that what virtue Blocks has lies in the fresh, exacting performances of three live, human performers--Melissa Guerrero, Ava Heller and Elise Hudson.

I felt so overwhelmed by the copious, heavy program notes that I tried to go back to my old Tere O'Connor experiment: sit there without taking notes, let the whole thing wash over me, and see what happens. After all, no matter what an artist writes, no matter what she says, and no matter how hard she works a work, the work itself must work.

My resolve did not last long, and I did take out my notebook. I wanted to be sure to remember how Guerrero, in particular, cut clear to the bone of movement that usually is so lush and fraught with tradition and cultural meaning. I felt it was important that koosil-ja's visual projections of theatrical and cultural dance styles that are normally so rich were, by comparison with her live dancers, rendered flatter than flat. Her contemporary movers--cleverly modeling themselves after the movement and still imagery they watched on screens--turned dancing into as yet arcane hierogylphics. They were consistently fascinating and rewarding.

But Blocks of Continuality feels not only like a retread but several retreads run together--the geeky computerized command base set-up; the almost ritualistic "calibration" of equipment and NASA-like checking in and launching; the live movement determining what the techno-toys do, and vice versa. Oh, look! Avatars! Wow!

Why did this all seem so drawn out--really, really drawn out--with a less than impressive payoff? Why is it that dance, when it tries to reflect what's happening now, so often seems to be lagging a few crucial heartbeats behind?

And why, if you've got a guy hooked up to a monitor so that his meditation--or whatever--supposedly makes a big, contorted contraption tap a wall, do we end up merely hearing something that sounds like the occasional thump and reverberation of a staple gun? What's the radical point here?

Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image, and Algorithm continues tonight and tomorrow night at 7:30pm. For complete information and ticketing, visit Dance Theater Workshop.