| It is a long turgid night of mediocre—some barely watchable—performances at “Improvisation and Otherwise” at Brooklyn’s BRIC theater. Worse yet, it is a venue where you have to sit at a table, eat dinner and socialize while watching the performances, protracting the pain. Finally, we are on the last act of the night, Lower Lights Collective, comprised of Weslyean graduates Aki Sasamoto, Arturo Vidich, Matt Bauder, Kate Ten Eyck, amongst others. People are still standing around socializing in the break between acts. A young man, Vidich, stands on the stage, barely noticed by the audience. |  |
The Wesleyan Mafia and Stepford Wives in Cloud City – Andrea Liu
It is a long turgid night of mediocre—some barely watchable—performances at “Improvisation and Otherwise” at Brooklyn’s BRIC theater. Worse yet, it is a venue where you have to sit at a table, eat dinner and socialize while watching the performances, protracting the pain. Finally, we are on the last act of the night, Lower Lights Collective, comprised of Weslyean graduates Aki Sasamoto, Arturo Vidich, Matt Bauder, Kate Ten Eyck, amongst others. People are still standing around socializing in the break between acts. A young man, Vidich, stands on the stage, barely noticed by the audience. He starts reading off a paper, still barely perceptible by the audience, in a village idiot dunce-like voice, oblivious to the fact he has not made any indication the performance has begun. Yet there is an ambiguity in the voice, as it is not obviously dunce-like, but also somewhat bland and uncharacterizable, with a muted Gomer Pyle-like style. After a few minutes at last the audience realizes the performance has started, and they begin to sit down at their evening theater dinner tables.
After a few short minutes, from the wings flanking either side of the audience, come two more preposterous characters from the fantastic sideshow. One is a hunched-over woman with a wheelbarrow, as she clumsily hobbles up to the stage with an unwieldy wheelbarrow. With her tousled unruly hair and slightly pudgy harried affect, she seemed like a cross between a disoriented housewife and a Hansel and Gretel bucolic fairytale forest wanderer, inseparable from her wooden wheelbarrow-cart.
Concurrently, on the stage a woman in a green workman’s jumpsuit, Sasamoto, is seen putting roller skate-like structures on her feet. After a few minutes she stands up, and we see these are not roller skates, but insect-like webbed tendon structures attached to her feet so that she stands a foot taller on the ground. She is floundering uncontrollably and spastically gyrating, as she tries to walk from downstage left down to the other corner of the stage. The audience is engrossed in seeing how she is able to walk with these freakish gigantic alien feet attached to her feet—with each step producing a thunderous clunking noise, evoking the Imperial Walkers from Empire Strikes Back. When finally she topples as the stress of walking on the webbed-feet tendons breaks them and causes her to collapse, the audience gasps.
The opening of this piece left the most ineradicable impression and was the most imagistically memorable—bereft of the captivating lunacy of their opening props, and the seeming subordination of their bodies to the absurd clench of them, the four characters were left to mill about onstage in varying layers of a miasma of sublime mayhem and unstructured non-time. Eliciting a sense of a haze or a hung-over drunken disorientation, the rest of the performance had the extraordinary effect of seeming blurry or out of focus despite the fact that it was not a film. Vidich at one point dons a Godzilla-like 4-foot long wooden lizard tail and prances around on stage. He continues reading from his enigmatic script, his words just on the edge of being distinguishable. With a mocking seriousness and an oddly blank evacuated tone to his voice, he has a steady commitment to, even obsession, with his text. From whatever words did come through, my guess as to what he was reading could be anything from nonsense gibberish to spatial directions to a metaphysical treatise.
The culmination of this undaunted mayhem, and certainly my favorite part, was the sling-shooting of food. Taking a long fire hose hung on the wall, they stretch it to the stage and attach potatoes to it, and then slingshot them against the wall. This piece perhaps showed an Yvonne Meier This is a Pink Pony influence of escaped-from-the-nuthouse madcap anarchy, destruction and irreverence (Vidich works with Meier), but without the self-satisfied hipper-than-thou I-have-Such-Great-Stars-of-Downtown-Dance-that-Anything-They-Do-is-Fascinating narcissism that at times marked Meier’s work. The true revelation is Sasamoto, one of the most promising young female choreographer-dancers in New York, who is blessed with a countercultural comic book character-like artful lunatic disregard for social norms and ordinariness. It is said that relative to turning out contemporary dancers and their alumnus’ influence on contemporary dance, Bennington College is a cult, and Wesleyan University is a mafia. The Wesleyan mafia strikes again!
Michael Helland, a choreographer hailing from Seattle, launches us into a Space Oddity-like otherworldly yet mordant piece in Do You Like Star Fiction? This premiered at Joyce Soho Presents, a biannual showcase for emerging and established choreographers. Using four dancers, it opens with one dancer asking the audience to think of a number between one and ten, in a removed yet ironic uncanny sci-fi game show host tone. Each number is assigned to a dancer, and as the number is called out, three dancers spaced across the expanse of the stage do a spare short dance combination. In this part it seems as if the dancers bodies are like taut pieces of metal string stretched and pinned at certain locations, and only movable at certain joints. It seems like their joints are on hinges, and there is something removed and completely evacuated of agency about the way in which they go about dancing—yet not so cliché as to be marionette-like. Though a short part, this opening section was extremely rich and reverberated with a plethora of meanings: the sarcastic mockery of audience and consumer satisfaction, the introduction of simultaneously ditzy, zombie-like, and ironic enigmatic dancer-characters, even a postmodern ontological commentary on the arbitrary nature of meaning. The calling out of numbers to determine dancing was a sardonic spurning of humanist notions of intentionality, “genius,” agency, or psychological personhood being the kernel of artistic creation. This opening section approached perfection in its blend of movement, meaning, and social commentary.
We see these four characters progress through a series of vignettes. They are wearing identical tan jumper-dresses, but each with an electrical outlet and a wire coming out of their dress at the chest. Helland is exquisitely adept at generating an entire mindset, and one that was thickly present, from these dancer-characters. They stand together in a horizontal line cooing a single word in hyperbolic dumb blonde unison; they walk up and down the stage like catwalk models with an exaggerated supermodel gaze, with martinet-like clenched face and unblinking stare, a travesty of female impersonation. What was so intriguing was that these dancer-characters seemed completely driven and bound, even trapped, in this intangible apparatus that compelled them to behave as they did, and yet oddly, they seemed entirely non-present as people. They elicited the impression of being helium-filled balloon-dolls crossed with pre-programmed robots in a faintly futuristic, technological world. Speculating about their consciousness was intriguing: Were they happy? Were they capable of being happy? Did they realize how devoid of human qualities they were? Did they mean their extreme artificiality to be ironic? It’s almost as if they held onto this infantilizing debilitating façade of Stepford wife-like zombie inanity with a ferocity and passion, as a type of armor. Even their moments of ecstasy were pathetic and self-debasing, premised upon self-inflicted indignities somehow twisted around to be points of social gain within the calculus of their weird world. The piece ended with the four women sticking their wires into each other’s outlets, and experiencing spasms of ecstasy.
Operating in a sublime stratosphere of acute social awareness blended with an exquisitely executed artistic sensibility, Helland’s was possibly my favorite dance piece of the season. If Lower Lights Collective can tie their synergetic eclecticism and raw unaffected irreverence with as strong a social awareness and highly matured raison d’etre behind the “form” as Helland, they will be doing very well.
