Everyone Into The Pool
Wiley Norvell
Noémie Lafrance trusts in fate. "I believe that things happen in the right time," says the 31 year-old choreographer, eyeing the ruins of Williamsburg’s McCarren Pool. "The timing is right, right now, because so many things are happening in our neighborhood and this is one of the open spaces that hasn’t been used."
Lafrance has chosen one of North Brooklyn’s architectural gems for the venue of her latest site-specific performance, Agora. A team of 30 dancers will bring the derelict floor of McCarren Pool to life on ten evenings, beginning September 13th.
Ever since Lafrance moved to New York from her native Montreal and founded Sens Production, the 70 year-old pool complex has loomed as a site of choice. But while Williamsburg has risen to become one of New York’s cultural hubs, the largest of New York’s Depression-era pools has sat unused. Barred with razor wire since closure in 1984, McCarren’s 38-foot Moorish arch remained a dense tapestry of graffiti (recently buried beneath a layer of thick red paint by Mayor Bloomberg’s graffiti taskforce). Lafrance has lobbied and raised funds, eventually resurrecting the Parks Department’s plans to restore the site.
A troupe of dancers from four individual companies–STREB, Young Dance Collective, Leigh Garrett and Miss Saturn–perform on a "stage" the size of three Olympic swimming pools. Female dancers with skateboards strapped to their backs skate along the inclined floor in a sort of backstroke, grabbing their male counterparts between the legs to pivot. Companies charge from the ledge of the pool to center stage, while other enclaves of dancers continue their performance on the wings, waiting to be drawn in themselves. It is an ambitious tableau.
Lafrance has established herself as something of a megalomaniac in the realm of dance. The 12 performers of Descent, her 2002 production that won two Bessie Awards, linked 12 floors of the City Court Building clock tower in dance. Spectators of 2004’s Noir took over a parking garage as the dance unfolded through their windshields.
Agora surpasses them all in breadth. Logistically, it has pushed Lafrance to choreograph in time, more than space. "It’s not like you have all these people right there and I can look at what they’re doing," says LaFrance, isolating a small corner of the pool between two hands. "I’m with the microphone. It’s happening everywhere at once. I want the space to be filled with multiple actions that overlap in this really interesting timing."
Distance shapes Agora in both its inspiration and execution. Lafrance makes use of the site in its entirety, with pockets of dancers drawing the eye to simultaneous points of interest. She wheels her arms across the floor during rehearsal. "You are following a story here and it might be continuing and you turn around and look over there, and it keeps continuing over there, and then you look back and ah! the story continues and actually it’s right here now next to you."
It isn’t merely the size of McCarren Pool that defines Agora; Lafrance’s performance draws of its past as a preeminent (and later, clandestine) cultural space. She ticks off aspects of the performance aroused by the site: "Everything from breaking bottles over there, to having skateboards and filling up the pool with water, having dancing salsa and dancing hip hop. Just everybody sitting around the pool and just being here is almost a kind of perfect ritual, a special sensation."
Agora makes a titular nod to the ancient Greeks, for whom the Agora was each city’s center of culture, discourse and commerce. McCarren Pool was, first and foremost, a world-class public space that served as the heart of North Brooklyn for nearly fifty years. It is Lafrance’s intention to see that space redeemed and once again accessible to the public. After ten days as a venue for Agora, the site will host concerts and performances designed to heighten its profile and raise money for its complete restoration as a functioning public pool (the price tag is estimated at $40 million). Its most recent patron speaks about the future with remarkable assurance.
"When you come here, you can think it’s beautiful, but I also think what could happen here, and what has happened here," muses Lafrance. "I think this is going to be the first uncovering of this space because there’s so much more to it."
