|
the
New York manufacturer of fine dance apparel for women and girls.
Click here to see a sample of our products and a
list of web sites for purchasing.
With Body Wrappers it's always performance at its best.
|
Go back to Flash Reviews
Go Home
Flash
Review 1, 4-18: Unglaublich
Rat-faced Bastards in the Kitchen with Sarah Michelson
By Chris Dohse
Copyright 2003 Chris Dohse
NEW YORK -- So this
is the next big thing. A scruffy, loud, spectacular stunt. A scrawny
rat-faced bastard of a dance that you want to take home and give
a bath. A sense of things happening all around you but from your
partial view you mostly see fellow audience members rubbernecking.
A mock profundity, a sense of having your leg pulled. The same bemused,
somewhat embarrassed faces as in that much-reproduced 1960 photo
of an audience at an Yves
Klein live-action painting.
In Sarah Michelson's
"Shadowmann Part I" at the Kitchen, there's a sense of fun and exuberant
plenitude in the composition, like in the happenings of Kaprow et
al., but there's a dire humorlessness in the mien of the dancers.
Is this mimicry or redefinition?
I can't tell. I can't identify a clear point of view. The music
choices -- '70s ballad rock -- don't sound as funny to someone who
lived through their heyday as they might to someone for whom they're
retro-chic.
The lack of a unified
focal point becomes monotonous. I long to be able to enter the action,
to walk around it, as one would have done at a party on the roof
of the Bauhaus.
What is the actual danced
vocabulary? Instantly, I can't remember, even though it seems like
maybe three phrases are being repeated to deadening extremity. Legs,
steps, passe positions, one gesturing arm --mostly limply done,
as if being marked. It's the spatial ingenuity and flat, flat affect
that I'll remember.
A chorus of teenaged
girls wears Dolce & Gabbana. The next day, looking through a copy
of Rolling Stone in my ophthalmologist's office, I see a D&G; ad.
One of the models in it wears the same skeevy half-grown-in beard,
the same Flock of Seagulls bangs and the same self-absorbed sneer
that Greg Zuccolo wears throughout the piece.
So is Michelson endorsing
this sleaze or mocking it? Or is it all just a coincidence? Would
it matter if I knew the answer?
After some obligatory
lip-synching, I'm torn between embarrassment over the hollow experience
I'm having and envy because I haven't been offered a similar opportunity
to wallow in alienating hauteur. Oh wait; maybe that's what criticism
is. I just can't dig the idea that I spent $30 (I didn't actually,
but the masses did) to have my nose rubbed in how uncool I am. To
have flaunted style remind me of in-group/out-group bias. But Henry
Baumgartner, in his role as overseer, thrills me.
Ever since R.
Mutt (a.k.a. Marcel Duchamp) placed a urinal in an art
exhibition, the idea that anything is art/nothing isn't art has
been acknowledged and tinkered with to various levels of success.
I guess I'd rather engage in some variation of this discourse than
watch Law and Order reruns, even if it pisses me off. After making
this distinction I grudgingly applaud the project's audacity.
A slide is projected
somewhat haphazardly on a side wall: a smiling woman against a background
of flowers. It could be the choreographer's mother or a found object.
Either would be equally significant, equally inane.
"Shadowmann Part II"
at PS 122 begins with gamin showgirl poses and whispered textbook
German conversations, counted things. Why this layer of obfuscation?
Only some of us will be able to understand the text. Why this pretense?
But I immediately warm
to Part II's smaller scale. Especially the ecru shag carpet that
covers the floor. I see the phrase material and its repetitions
not as dance so much as behavior. The teenaged trio is here again,
now huddled in a corner, dressed in blue gauze. Last week they looked
aloof; now they're bored, with cherubic curls.
I could eat Paige Martin
with a spoon. The flowers in the anonymous slide from Part I are
reflected in the pattern of the floor-length curtains that hem two
sides of the space. Greg's beard is thankfully gone but his moustache
has taken on Marlboro Man proportions. Behind my head, three video
monitors transmit identical flat anonymous landscapes.
Michelson occasionally
utters the word, "unglaublich." Our awareness of us watching them
becomes palpable, a third integer in an equation. The performers
brazenly toy with their power; toy with being the object of what
Schechner calls our "selective inattention." When the curtains are
pulled open to reveal 9th Street, the audience becomes part of the
show on a different level, available for watching by passersby.
Again, I won't remember
the actual movement, only its framing devices. The bodies are static
a lot, awaiting but not noticing each other's activities as they
arise and fall away. It's a relief in some way to be freed from
the falsehood of the "willing suspension of disbelief" of Aristotelian
theater.
But just what is that
pinched expression on Michelson's face? What is she feeling? Contempt
or despair?
Go back to Flash Reviews
Go Home
|