Stage Combat
Bozidar Boskovic
For over 20 years, Spring has brought performance to the heavily trafficked intersection at 42nd Street and Park Avenue. The Whitney Museum of American Art at Altria, a free midtown outpost of the museum, commissions artists to contribute pieces for Performance on 42nd, a multi-evening, and free, series of music, dance, and theater performances. The glass-enclosed space provides an oasis for artists who wish to trial the 5,200 square-foot sculpture court that runs nearly a full block. This Spring that glass enclosure became a scene of protest–orchestrated, reenacted, transposed.
The word terror makes us shudder with an intangible threat, fixate on an impending, unknowable horror. The multidisciplinary art group VisionIntoArt (VIA) successfully harnesses the tools of the theater of expression to both represent human disaster and use it as a platform for political subversion. VIA intervened in the gallery with A Tough Line–investigating the relationship between hostages and the spaces in which they are held captive. The work is based on the events of October 2002, when 40 armed Chechen separatists interrupted the musical Nord-Ost, seizing the Dubravka Theater, holding 800 people hostage for more than 60 hours, and demanding the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops in Chechnya. The terrorists entered the theater at the beginning of the second act. Audience members reported that they assumed the terrorists were actors in the play, costumed with guns and bombs, attempting to enact the Siege of Leningrad. It was not a performance. And after a three day standoff, the Russian military pumped the theater full of powerful sedative that ended the hostage crisis, but inadvertently ended many lives as well. VIA and their team of collaborating artists integrate poetry, video, music, dance and theater to create A Tough Line: exploring a moment when art and terrorism converged.
Composer Milica Paranosic said that the music lent itself as a the central strain of the performance; other artists used their on mediums to build upon this thread. Illustrator Emily Flake, who collaborated closely with Chase Palmer on the drawings that were projected on video during the performance, commented that many of visuals were inspired from the book Small Corner of Hell by Anna Politkovskaya: "The idea of drawn vignettes that were moving the plot came from Chase, he wanted somewhat of degraded quality of film, something that is not prettied up, something bleak."
The non-profit VIA was founded in order to do just that–tackle troubling topics and not pretty them up. The instigators of the project Paola Balsamo Prestini and Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, co-directors of VisionIntoArt, intend to use interdisciplinary languages to inquire about the value and expression of a creative/collective identity within a democratic society.
One of the first collaborative works that VIA produced was the Democracy Project, inspired by historian James Allan Smith, founder of Center for Arts & Culture in Washington DC. Prestini said: "Since 9/11 the role of the arts in democratic societies poses different questions, addressing the role of social change and asking if the arts is able to bridge barriers."
Through performance, lectures and discussions, VIA asked, addressed and then asked again: How does the imagination help us to envision a different future? How do the arts sharpen perspectives, and illuminate connections?
VIA’s next project is a series of six workshops and performances to be created during its Fall/Spring 2006/07 residency at the Chelsea Art Museum. Based on the book Sounds, by Vasil Kandisnsky, the project will be a work in progress–playing with Kandinsky’s ideas about total theater, and the nature of abstract expressionism in the arts. Once again the piece will enforce the notion of inter-disciplinary collaboration inspiring feedback and discussion from the audience.
A Tough Line integrated a variety of art forms: Music by composers Nora Kroll-Rosenbaum, Milica Paranosic, Paola Prestini & Nico Muhly; poetry by Roger Bonair-Agard and Lynne Procope; film by Chase Palmer; animation by Emily Flake; choreography by Elizabeth Motley, dramaturgy by Amiel Melnick. Musicians include: Pablo Rieppi, on percussion, Erik Carlson, on violin, Jeffrey Zeigler & Wendy Law on cellos, Richard Mannoia on clarinet and saxophone. Actors: Frances Chewing, Jonathan Green, Holter Graham & Mahira Kakkar. Soprano: Halehh Abghari.
