InfiniteBody

Sunday, January 31, 2016

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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Saturday, January 30, 2016

Yvonne Chouteau, 86

Yvonne Chouteau, Native American Ballerina, Dies at 86
by Jack Anderson, The New York Times, January 29, 2016

Friday, January 29, 2016

Jacques Rivette, 87

Jacques Rivette, Enigmatic French New Wave Director, Dies at 87
by David Kehr, The New York Times, January 29, 2016

Shannon Gillen's Vim Vigor troupe premieres "Separati"

Shannon Gillen's Separati
(photos: Arnaud Falchier)

Separati enters the turbid psychic space of highway travel and anonymous companionship. Caught up at a midway point, five characters travel through the past, present and dark hallucinatory projections of the future. Stilled periods of waiting juxtapose wild physical bouts of surreal movement, as reality gives way to the imagination. What is the distance between where we have come from and where we want to go? Between what happens to us and who we are? Can the space between bodies and ideas ever be joined? And if not, can we exist in the middle ground of separation?

Separati--Shannon Gillen's hour of dance theater at Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center--left me winded and feeling pistol-whipped. I would have checked her Vim Vigor Dance Company for bruises and sprains, but I was too busy checking myself.

And its psychic space really is "turbid," as advertised. With its Edward Hopper lighting and its stark old phone booth isolated in the middle of nowhere, Separati strands its characters, and its watchers, in a nightmare between real life and the surreal. Unpredictable cacaphony--disembodied or channeled voices that taunt and mock; pop-up music, new and nostalgic; assortments of sounds--would be enough to make anyone want to claw her way back to wakefulness. But it's the choreography for the five characters--seemingly rootless travelers who hook up and entangle--that takes the greatest toll.

(photos: Arnaud Falchier)

Jason Cianciulli and Martin Durov portray two creepy men, endlessly controlling and abusive; Laja Field, Lavinia Vago and Emma Whiteley, the women caught in their magnetic force field. Separati might need to come with a trigger warning.

I'm not sure about Gillen's murky questions about "the space between bodies and ideas" and "can we exist in the middle ground of separation." All I can say is it would have been far better had these bodies, these human gyroscopes, never closed any separating gap. As hard to watch as it is, the action exerts punishing, diamond-making pressure on these performers, and they are absolutely there for that pressure.

Although Gillen herself boasts an extensive international career in performance and dancemaking, Vim Vigor is a young venture, just formed in 2015. Given the all-out dancing and acting on display in Separati--and Gillen's impressive direction--this troupe bears watching. Fortify yourself and go tonight or tomorrow at 7:30pm. For tickets, click here.

Gelsey Kirkland Arts Center
29 Jay Street (between John and Plymouth Streets), Brooklyn
(map/directions)

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