|
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 Journal, 10-31: The Outsider
Skimming the Surface with DV8; Floating with Dubois and Duranteau
By Paul Ben-Itzak
Copyright 2003 The Dance Insider
PARIS -- I've seen junior
high school revues with more sophisticated satirical punch than
"The Cost of Living," DV8 Physical Theatre's superficial screed
about outsiders and the tricks we make them do, or something like
that, perpetrated last weekend at the Theatre de la Ville - Sarah
Bernhardt, in a co-production with the Festival d'Automne and others.
From the moment when
a small legless man pops out of a set of stairs and whirls himself
about the room with buffed arms, director Lloyd Newson's point rings
as familiar as yesterday's newspaper.
The legless man -- I'm
persisting in describing him like this because this aspect of the
(quite gifted) performer is exploited as such, and the program didn't
identify the performers by roles -- makes jokes about his private
parts, and is needled about them by a bully. The same interpreter
(the bully) earlier rattles off the prices for which he'll deliver
various ballet positions, which he demonstrates with detachment.
Another man goads his mate to perform various favorite tricks for
us. The apogee comes during a 'beauty contest' when one of the bathing-suited
men introduces himself by saying (I paraphrase), "I'm American!
I was hired because of my size! I'm afraid if I lose any weight,
I'll be out of a job!" You can see the audition ad: "DV8 Physical
Theatre seeks Lawrence Goldhuber-type for upcoming work."
And speaking of Goldhuber,
he, and his former boss Bill T. Jones, have done this type of thing
-- confronting how spectators confront 'atypical' performing body
types -- better than Newson and, furthermore, it's just been a starting
point for them to developing more complex dramas that ask deeper
questions. They've long gone beyond simply identifying the issue,
but Newson appears to be unaware that they, or anyone else, has
already been there before him.
Last night, on my return
from Antwerp, I was stopped on the platform by six black-garbed
members of the National Police. They asked me questions, they had
me open all my bags -- no such thing as a search warrant here! --
and, focusing on them as the most suspicious objects, the gruffest
and biggest of the men shook several cans of Sonia's "Kitekat" Terrine
au boeuf cat food, holding them to his ear as if that would help
him detect if they really contained nitro-glycerine. He even opened
one can and stuck his finger in it. (Sonia usually uses her nose.)
I'm in a foreign country, so I was meek and cooperative and returned
their "Merci" with my own. But I was pretty rattled. No one is delighted
at being stopped and searched by the police, but as a foreign-born
person of Jewish descent living in France, I have a particular terror
of being stopped by French policemen, whose predecessors rounded
up most of the 75,000 Jews deported to the Nazi death camps. This
is the second time I've been stopped. In other words, I fit the
racial profile -- or the police's racial profile, anyway, based
on what race they think I am. (Don't let anyone tell you France
is a race-blind country; the race-blind country is the one you're
sitting in, American dance insider.)
Returning to this reviewing
assignment, I find myself pondering: Why couldn't Mr. Newson have
gone a little deeper, and instead of just pretending to reveal our
prejudices against people who fall outside what others consider
the norm, ask WHY? Why are some people treated differently because
of what other people think of them based on the way they look? Why
was I stopped on the platform? Why are some noted critics repulsed
by dancers who they consider too skinny or too fat? How can people
-- be they police at a train station or spectators at a dance performance
-- make judgments on people solely by their appearance? Art doesn't
always have to answer or even pose difficult questions like this
-- expressed with sufficient eloquence, it can sometimes be enough
to simply represent the problem. But in choreography, text, music,
in fact in all its production values, Newson's "The Cost of Living"
is hardly eloquent. Probing no new ground, it's little more than
a superficial classroom exercise, and has no place on the serious
stage.
Speaking of outsiders, the Festival Art Outsiders, on view at the
Maison Europeenne de la Photographie here through November 9, includes
a choreography-computer whiz collaboration that puts Eshkar-Kaiser
to shame.
The theme of this year's
festival is "Space," as in Outer, and the choreographic element
of Kitsou Dubois and Eric Duranteau's "File/Air, l'ambiguite des
limites" appears to have begun in a gravity-less chamber. Here the
activity -- which looks largely to involve improvised experiments
in partnering -- was captured and graphically re-tooled by Duranteau,
the computer whiz half of the collaboration.
In a cave-like chamber
in the basement of the facility -- in an ancient building near the
Marais and not far from the Seine -- the dancers are projected,
in white chalk outline (a la a victim's tracing at a crime scene)
on the granite walls, curved ceiling, floor, two transparent scrims
intersecting the space, and even you, should you choose to walk
between the two facing projectors. As choreography, "File/Air" is
more about discovering how to move and partner without gravity than
imagining how to do so creatively; one dancer seems to lift another
by the neck and flip her over him, another flies vertically apparently
suspended only by a partner's hold on her wrists. They scale the
walls of the spaceship-like interior where the piece appears to
have been shot, in turn projected on the wall of the exhibition
space. And they move, or float, in ethereal slow motion.
Eshkar-Kaiser's work,
at least as seen in Merce Cunningham's "Biped," has always left me a bit cold, the computer-manipulated
images not coming up to the live ones being produced by the choreographer
and the dancers. With "File/Air," choreographer Dubois and 'image
scenographer' Duranteau have made a more integrated work, in which
each artist's talent complements the other's, and in which the method
of working matches the subject.
Festival Art Outsiders
continues through November 9 at the Maison Europeenne de la Photographie,
5-7 rue de Fourcy. The festival's web site is rather horrendous,
so I'm not going to send you there, but I would like to send you
to the Maison any Wednesday from 5 to 8 p.m., when it's free and
quite the scene, without being too trendy.
Go back to Flash Reviews
Go Home
|