robbinschilds spells "Hex" at Gibney

Hex probes the complexities surrounding authorship, specifically how each collaborator influences the outcome of a day’s work, the building of material, and ultimately the finished composition. By exposing the cooperative agency in the construction of artistic vocabulary, Hex expands the notion of creator.

--from publicity for Hex 

Postmodern choreographers often pose questions or assign themselves challenges that seem mainly addressed to their peers. And just look around at who's sitting in the seats, supporting and grappling with the work--their peers. It's an inside job, a subset of the big, wide world of dance (even just that portion of it fighting for life in New York), a world in which values, philosophies, methods, needs and aspirations are quite diverse.

Portion of Hedia Maron's video for Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

Anna Azrieli (top) with Eleanor Smith in Hex
(photo: Scott Shaw)

The dancing in Hex--an hour-long video/live work by robbinschilds at Gibney Dance: Agnes Varis Performing Arts Center--strikes me as a prime example of this situation. It's populated by interesting individual movers--Aretha Aoki, Anna Azrieli, Bessie McDonough-Thayer, Eleanor Smith, Mariana Valencia--overshadowed by premise and staging. Here, robbinschilds directors Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs yield authorship to these dancers as choreographers. The sixth maker--Vanessa Anspaugh--does not perform live in the piece.

We are committed to our cooperative practice as a means of subverting the archetypal 'male' trope of solo-creator. For this reason we see the process of collaboration not merely as a creative strategy, but also a feminist platform from which to cull a stronger collective vision.

--from "A short manifesto on Hex" by robbinschilds

The audience enters Gibney's Studio C to see four projection screens extended around the broad performance area, two of the screens divided to show two different scenes of the choreographers at work on solos that the ensemble will then take up as material to explore. We watch these images for a while, perhaps most naturally drawn in by the crisp intensity in Hedia Maron's closeups of Valencia and Azrieli.

Otherwise, where to look? Without received direction, our eyes flit and roam, scanning the screens, taking in fragments, randomly piecing one bit with another and another. In a real sense, watchers add to the authorship, and I wonder if Robbins and Childs factored us in.

The soundscape (Dana Wachs/Vorhees) often suggests street-side construction. The live performing seems fragmentary and accumulative, too. A single dancer first appears in the space--McDonough-Thayer, if I recall correctly--but we don't see other dancers in waiting, percolating in the open space to the rear of our seating. Something made me turn my head, though, and I noticed them. Over the course of the dance, one or more drifted into view or returned to this dark recess.  And, again, as a watcher (author?), I found I could relate--leaning in or leaning out from time to time.

Hex runs through Saturday, February 6. Performances are at 8pm plus an additional show at 5pm on Saturday. 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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Late-night C.L.U.E. show added tonight

This just in from Performance Space 122: Due to popular demand, you'll get an additional shot at robbinschild's C.L.U.E. tonight (Friday) at 10:30pm. Click here for my review and here for the complete schedule and ticketing details.

Got a C.L.U.E. for you

Like most relatively sane people, I dread crowded subways and cramped airline seats and, for a brief moment last night, I had my attitude on when I was crammed into the middle of a row of tightly-packed seats in Performance Space 122's downtown theater for C.L.U.E. This roughly hour-long work is a new incarnation of a traveling performance and installation piece by robbinschilds (Sonya Robbins and Layla Childs) and frequent collaborators AJ Blandford (set) and A.L. Steiner (who made the film with the duo). The lighting is by Joe Lavasseur.

The theater brimmed with patrons, and the last person to arrive in my row kept standing up and twisting around to see if the people she expected had finally arrived--they hadn't, and the entrance had already been closed--thus further invading my personal space with her winter coat, her large bag and her warm exhalations. As I waited for the performance to begin, I trained a leery eye on the smallish, identical video projections on two of the walls--a static scene of scruffy, uneven terrain--and on the mound of fake grey boulders wedged into one corner of the space. I didn't notice the lava debris and blond sand on the floor until later, but I did notice that Blandford had placed a representation of the natural world--albeit a tacky, ungainly one--in a theater, a temple of the artificial. The boulders took up much of the performance space and looked ominous and right-up-in-our-faces.

In addition, I had the sneaking suspicion that the score created and performed by Kinski (Chris Martin, Matthew Reid Schwartz, Barrett Wilke and Lucy Atkinson) would mean having to brave an aural onslaught from the left side of the space. (They like that sort of thing at PS 122.) I wasn't wrong about that escalation of hostilities, quite appropriate to the show's escalating exhilaration, but by the end of the evening, the band had made an unlikely new fan. I hadn't realized how enchanting, even sensuous at times, Kinski could be.

And I wasn't quite prepared for what Robbins and Childs had in mind, but their first entrance--and I think it's fair to call it that--warmed me to them and made me chuckle to myself. In the video, a couple of tiny, red-clad figures peeked out from the behind the rocks and sparse foliage and began to pick their way across the terrain, moving in and out of view. Such a small way to make a big entrance and, amid all that stillness, what a big impact that tinyness had! Although they were not physically present in the theater and were remotely situated in the video's environment, they seemed to be with us. And, no, I can't explain it any better than that. Trust me or see for yourself.

Inspired by travels along the backroads of Southern California, C.L.U.E. (color location ultimate experience) introduces us to two wild, mysterious women who, through their movements, live and on video, come to channel the formidably strong and violent forces of the natural (rocks, lake, sea) and artificial (highway) environment around them. Starting off as distant, miniscule figures in a video, who nevertheless seem palpably real, Robbins and Childs become forces of nature who rock the theater--and us--with their raw energy. And I'm upset now to learn that the Times's great art critic Holland Cotter got to call Robbins and Childs Thelma and Louise long before I did.

In the most practical sense, the "color" in "color location ultimate experience" refers to the pair's frequent costume changes--each featuring clothing of a single, deeply-saturated color--which, along with the shock of real sage smoke wafting through the air and the cranked up music put me in mind of the '60s. The piece unfolds before us like a tempting drug and like the effects of one.



See robbinschilds's C.L.U.E. at PS 122 tonight at 8:30pm through Saturday (with additional Friday and Saturday performances at 10:30pm). Click here for information and tickets.