InfiniteBody

Saturday, March 31, 2018

From a whisper to a shriek: Diamanda Galás's "Schrei 27"

from Schrei 27--
a film by Diamanda Galás and Davide Pepe

What has kept Diamanda Galás's metal-shredder voice going, decade after decade, while gentler singers' pipes rust over? It must be more than "drinking plenty of water," the discipline she cites in a 2017 interview. Should we revive that old legend--a secret deal with the devil? Tartini. Paganini. Robert Johnson. Diamanda Galás?

Schrei 27 (2011)--her installation in collaboration with video artist Davide Pepe--can't quite make up for the total shock-and-awe of Galás performing live right in front of you. And yet, the film--screened for the first time in the US at Performance Space New York--delivers its own body blow.

The work originated, in 1994, as a commission for radio. Then Galás transformed it into a live performance--Schrei X, 1996--set in darkness at Performance Space 122 (now Performance Space New York). So, this week's screenings were a kind of coming home, part of the newly-reopened institution's season of remembrance of the avant-garde artistic history of the East Village.

For Pepe's half-hour film, viewers entered a theater lit only by its movie screen, picked their way to seats and then took a steep descent into the hell of a mysterious medical institution. A prisoner, arrested for treason, suffers torture suggested indirectly in stark, surrealist detail--an eye is a mouth; a mouth, an eye; x-ray flashes reveal the bones of restrained hands and wrists; teeth loom like a row of tombstones in moonlight. And the sounds...those caustic, scorching sounds....

Galás's painted and drawn imagery, Pepe's photography, and the precision sound work by Blaise Dupuy and Dave Hunt create a flickering nightmare intent on seizing and scrambling the brainwaves of witnesses as we try to watch and fail to watch by squinting, looking aside, shielding our eyes. What, I wonder, do they hope to make us confess?

For information on upcoming performances and exhibitions at Performance Space New York, click here.

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Friday, March 30, 2018

Anita Shreve, 71

Anita Shreve, Best-Selling Novelist, Dies at 71
by Neil Genzlinger, The New York Times, March 30, 2018

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Thursday, March 29, 2018

Making space sing: Anna Sperber at The Chocolate Factory

Anna Sperber in Wealth From The Salt Seas
(photo: Brian Rogers)

The costumes for Anna Sperber's Wealth From The Salt Seas--a duet with vocalist/musician Gelsey Bell--display at least two variations on a theme of chocolate brown. (Sperber's pants, hard to make out in the lighting, might be of a hue between dull dark brown and charcoal.) More than a possible sly reference to the work's venue, The Chocolate Factory Theater, the color has immediate effect--low-key and calming, earthy without being overly sensuous or overbearing, not stark like black. This, as it turns out, is a deep-brown dance.

It's appropriate for the choreographer who might easily go unnoticed when making her quiet, unremarkable first entrance with dark-brown hair pulled back from a scrubbed, serene face. She's just suddenly there, settled in place for a moment.

Sperber eventually drifts from one corner to another, positioning herself at one or another end of a row of viewers, slowly tracing hands over her face and neck and around her waist and hips. Her awareness is internal; you can feel that as easily as you feel the weight and slight friction of hands on skin and fabric.

Sperber's enigmatic, repetitive actions bring attention to the margins of the space and gather stillness and silence there like a gift. You might notice the difference this makes and think: Have I ever looked at performance space--or a performance--in quite this way?

Bell's entrance introduces sound--a voice that momentarily heightens in volume and shrillness. The sound score for the hour-long dance is produced by recorded and live voicings; the impact of feet on the floor; the strange effect of crouching and howling into the corner between two walls; the haunting bells played by the women as they bend their faces to them; and the reverberation of metallic sheets rattled and filling the air between Sperber and Bell as if, like whales, they signaled each other across an expanse of sea.

Curious props appear--a long, thick cable that Sperber manipulates; the odd-looking bells cast in blackish metal; a tarp of golden plastic; small, wooden scaffolds at either diagonal end of the space where the women climb and store their equipment. Curious, too, those moments when you swear you just saw one or the other dancer but she's suddenly out of sight, then she reappears as if nothing out of the ordinary happened.

Wealth From The Salt Seas continues through Saturday, March 31 with performances at 8pm. For information and tickets, click here.

The Chocolate Factory Theater
5-49 49th Avenue, Long Island City
(map/directions)

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Wednesday, March 28, 2018

Davalois Fearon and the politics of race in dance

Davalois Fearon in Time to Talk
(photo: ANDREW IMAGING)

Sometimes, there's the story you intend to tell, and then there's the unintended story you wind up telling.

Davalois Fearon--a powerful dancer acclaimed for her many years with Stephen Petronio--has struck out on her own. In recent years, she has developed earnest multimedia pieces like Consider Water (2017) and the new Time to Talk, running this week at Mabou Mines. The background of Time to Talk--Fearon's literature cites research in "American history, dance history, racial identity formation and systemic racism"--has yielded a work that slightly gestures at the toxicity of these massive, interlocking entities. It hovers around what it means to train, professionally perform and be seen and critiqued performing dance in a Black body. And we know that's what the Jamaica-born Fearon has done exceptionally well--the irony of the piece being that you readily see she's a woman who excels at whatever she sets her mind to doing. Her supple, sculptural, forceful body is equipped to ace every form of movement--from ballet barre to twerking--even when built-in, exaggerated imperfections show she's unhappy and unfulfilled by the expectations that others put on her.

There's the distraction of her mastery, a mastery undercut by only partially-disguised misery and resentment. I get it. But the main story it's actually telling me--and underscoring any number of times--is the familiar one about how Black people take whatever's available to us and make it shine like the sun. We've been doing that from way back and do it still. And then other people copy what we've done, often profiting from it.

With prompting and accompaniment from her husband, jazz musician Mike McGinnis, Fearon makes various attempts to find the right genre of dance that's "appropriate" for her to do. As an interracial couple, they seem to have mined their own situation and conversations for material. Unfortunately, this creates some imbalance: He's an accomplished artist in his own right but not an actor; his awkwardness, when not working a sax or clarinet, weakens their interactions and gives Time to Talk an amateurish feel. I believe their good intentions, though, and I believe they need still more time to nurture depth, breadth and incisiveness in the work.

Fearon cites her Jamaican upbringing as a shield from racism. She experienced colorism in the Caribbean, for sure, but admits it was only when she entered grad school at a Midwestern university, a few years ago. that she discovered what Blacks face in the US on the regular. Her experiences in Milwaukee shocked her.

Fearon's aims to spark audience dialogue and follows each performance with a talkback with McGinnis and guests. Last evening, she included representatives from the NAACP and the Anti-Defamation League. I counted just a few Black people in the room--including myself and Fearon's own understudy. It was disheartening to hear no one actually acknowledge the systemic nature of American racism (not just how people getting to know one another better will cure things). It also made me tired to hear most of the talking--at great length and intensity--issuing from white men.

But, again, the story you didn't intend to tell is sometimes the one that rolls out even so.

Time to Talk continues through Thursday, March 29 with performances at 9pm. For information and tickets, click here. For tickets by phone call 212-352-0255 or 1-866-811-4111.

Mabou Mines Theater
150 1st Avenue (between 9th and 10th Streets), Manhattan
(map/directions)

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