separated at birth: person as poem

The Sunday Times had an article on Grete Wiesenthal and the influence of the Viennese waltz on modern dance. Wiesenthal moved off the vertical axis of the ballet dancer and added curves and extensions. She toured with her sisters Elsa and Berta. (I have a sister Berta, short for Roberta.) After the sisters performed in London, the Dancing Times is quoted as saying the sisters "were not mere performers; they were poems."

Photographs by Rudolf Jobst, Östrreichisches Theatermuseum

(from the NY Times article)

When Alexis Rose meets Mutt's new girlfriend Tallahassee, er, Tennessee, Alexis says she is like a poem, like a pretty poem. Totally Alexis.

Indonesian scarf, caught in the wind

"Last week, she told me to dance like an Indonesian scarf caught in the wind. I don't even know that that looks like."

Stevie Budd, in "The Roast" episode, Season 5

Schitt's Creek (2015-2020)

Yinka Shonibare MBE

"Wind Sculpture (SG) I"

Central Park, New York City

(photo: Jason Wyche)

exquisite corps(e)

Ten years ago, Sharon, Carol, Eric, and I did an exquisite corpse drawing during an ARLIS/NY meeting. Ten minutes ago, I watched an exquisite dance-film by Mitchell Rose: Exquisite Corps (42 choreographers, 1 dance). I've seen performances by a number of the dancing choreographers and the video is fine. Here's Meredith Monk:

missing NYC

Missing NYC. Yesterday the New York Times had reviews of a show of work by Elaine Reichek at the Jewish Museum and work by Eleanor Antin at Columbia University. Reichel's needlepoint work about being Jewish looks compelling. "If you think you can be a little bit Jewish, you think you can be a little bit pregnant." Antin's work on identity has been around since the 1970s and has lost none of its power. Social practice from way back.

I was reading the paper as I waited for the Kyle Abraham and Abraham.in.Motion performance of Pavement to begin. It was incredible, reminded me of many visits to the Joyce, Danspace, BAM, Dance Theater Workshop, Duke, etc. etc. etc., in the quality of production and presentation.

This picture is from the company website and gives some idea of the energy. But it wasn't only the hard energy seen here; the dancers were also capable of loveliness and softness. A fine mix of modern, balletic, jazz, and street, and, gosh, just movement. Some text, mostly recorded. Oh, it was inside at Alfred with projections on the basketball backboard, and a single orange line marking the box of the in-or-out floor space.

One of the most powerful scenes was with Abraham as a street guy saying "help me" and the rest pretty much ignoring him, or worse. The lights went way down and the red revolving lights of a cop car came from off stage right. The street guy kept saying "help me" as a duet was happening in the near darkness. It was very compelling. I saw the darkness as protection from the overwhelming sadness of the social interaction (or non-interaction). In the talk back after the performance, Abraham said he thought it was "abstract" but I found it perhaps the most literal part of the narrative on fallen down neighborhoods.

You will note that the company includes both black and white dancers. Abraham himself is black. Some parts of the dance played very much off race and the race of the dancer mattered. Other parts were very mixed or silent on race. The term "post black" came to mind but I decided it was more like "race optional" (parallel to the clothing optionality of naturists). Besides, "post" anything is too easy, too ubiquitous.

I was sitting next to Laurel Jay Carpenter so of course we had to talk about performance and New York City. She just got back from sabbatical, some of which was spent in the City. She lived in the City for a decade or so, mostly before I lived there from 1995-2009. I first saw her when she did the Red Woman work in Tompkins Square in the early-mid aughts. I told her I wished I could find someone who had an extra room in their house/apartment or a small live/work space so that I could impulsively take off for a few days in NYC and not worry about imposing on someone or selling off my stock to stay in a hotel. She said "everybody wants that." Sigh. We know it's really not EVERYbody but there are a lot of us in Alfred that are very fond of the opportunities and street life of New York City.

All of this flowed through after Thursday night's Village Planning Board meeting with the ritual discussion of the drunkenness and litter and noise of Alfred nights. NYC is undoubtedly cacophonous but it's a constant, exuberant, gritty noise, not to everyone's taste or anyone's constant desire. The number of Styrofoam boxes along with cans and other litter on the streets of Alfred on Saturday or Sunday morning is devastatingly depressing for me. I can't believe that so much crappy post-drinking food can be consumed and that so many consumers of said stuff can be so sloppy in disposing of the containers.

Added to this cacophony of thoughts was the review on Thursday entitled "A small-town girl who wants out": the Hill Town Plays, a cycle of five plays by Lucy Thurber, produced concurrently by Rattlestick Plyawrights Theater in Greenwich Village theaters, set in western Massachusetts. Charles Isherwood, reviewer, has some pithy things to say about the "soul-deadening anomie" and "grim determinism" that infects the characters and setting.

So I've been missing the City after several months of seeing art in various upstate and other locations as I traveled around. The Georgia O'Keeffe and Lake George show at the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, for example, was really fine. So I thought I wasn't minding too much that I haven't been to the City since February but perhaps that's been part of the soul-deadening anomie that's been hanging over me.

framing the site

As an library cataloger, I try to put things in pigeon-holes or categories to enable the library user to find our resources. Today's Bergren Forum was presented by Chase Angier who teaches dance at Alfred University. Her talk centered around "Shifting Landscapes: Framing Site Specific Performance." She spoke about guided performance, walking site performance, and immersive frame performance, and would have talked about other things she's working on if they'd given her another hour to talk.

The first work Chase talked about -- "Under the Benign Sky" (Texas Woman's University) -- was done in the atrium of a building. Chase said the empty rectangular space with balconies said Spanish soap operas and romance to her. I thought it looked like a prison. Hmm.

So, pigeon-holing: cataloging and vocabulary control help you find things in a catalog or on the web (more with the former) because we try to avoid unnecessary synonyms and try to use the same form for names of persons and organizations. I wrote the Library of Congress some years ago when they started using "Site-specific installations (Art)" in addition to "Installations (Art)." It seemed to me that the former was not significantly enough different from the latter to make it valuable. That is, all installations are inherently site-specific though some have been reinstalled and look very different. My example at that moment was "Deep Purple" by Tom Burr which was shown in the below-street-level well in front of the Whitney in 2002-2003 but had earlier been shown on the lawn of a German museum. It looked very different against concrete than it did on a lawn. But it was still the same work and it was still installed.

LC's response to my query was to add scope notes:
Installations (Art): Here are entered works on a type of art form in which an entire exhibition space is transformed into a three-dimensional work of art by the arrangement of objects and materials within the space.
Site-specific installations (Art): Here are entered works on art installations created for a specific site that use elements of the site as an integral part of the work of art and are intended to be displayed and viewed only at that site.
LCSH also includes Film ..., Multimedia ..., Sound ..., and Video installations (Art).

Of course, installation is also what happens all the time in museums, that is, a painting or sculpture is placed in a certain way in a gallery. Even an old-master painting will look different, depending on its neighboring works, lighting, gallery style, etc. LCSH has "Museum techniques" and "Museum exhibits" to cover that kind of thing.

At the end of Chase's talk, she talked about how framing was critical. It's true and I'm still thinking about the role of framing in visual art installations. The line between visual and performance art is, of course, blurry. Chase also talked about the ways you can control or cede control of the audience. As she talked about the sound and speed, I was thinking about some of the Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller pieces I've seen that have a timed soundtrack. I don't think there was a chance to pause them but I may be misremembering. Very much controlled experiences in space and time ... though the "Pandemonium" exhibition at Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia was not temporally controlled except by the open hours of the museum.

The picture is from Chase's website (linked under her name) and is from the work "Framing Edgewood Farm."

dance and clay

Marcela Giesche, Amsterdam-based dancer, is a guest artist at Alfred University and she presented her work on Friday and Saturday night. The Saturday evening concert began with a work on the stairs leading to C.D. Smith Auditorium by the student dancers. It involved their doing movements that were apparently being instructed via iPod: a few steps down, a couple back up, a few paces to the left, lean over the rail. It was interesting as they got tangled with audience members waiting for the doors to open. The program acknowledged John Gill for his advice about the clay. It wasn't until she was a ways into the clay part that I realized that Giesche was being contextual in using clay to mark her residency here at Alfred, home of the New York State College of Ceramics.

"Wanderers and Wonderers" started out with Giesche "hidden" under leaves of newspaper, along with a light layer of newspaper spread about the whole dance floor. They asked us to leave the auditorium, if we were able, during the intermission. We returned to the single layer of newspaper covering the floor and the mound of Giesche in the upper center of the floor. In the first half of the piece, Giesche moved about, mostly horizontal, and pushed the newspaper around, ending with her sweeping the rest to the edges. For the second half of the piece, she, nearly naked, covered her body with clay slip and "drew" on the floor as she moved about it with her slipp(er)y body. She ended by brushing some of the drying slip back into the basin from which it came. Going full circle, I guess. Parts of it were very lovely, including the shadows. Her partner, Bruno Caverna, was not able to leave Norway to join her and I wondered how the piece would have been different as a two-person work rather than solo.

The program notes said "How much of our identity is constructed by the opinions and beliefs of others? What does it take to strip these layers away and find ourselves floating in the unknown again? The body becomes our only reference point, timelessly recovering itself through the senses -- in a state of perpetual wonder --" I wasn't sure that any of this really played out in the work for me but it was interesting to see the use of clay for an Alfred dance.