Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times - September 29, 2007

Performance anxiety kicked in immediately. As the audience walked into the rectangular, whitewashed room at the Chocolate Factory on Wednesday night, each person was handed a floor plan, with chair-moving directions for each of the four sections of Tere O'Connor's "Rammed Earth," a new work that had its premiere two weeks ago in Philadelphia.

As it turned out, two ushers were on hand to guide the audience. But whether or not Mr. O'Connor intended the floor plan, with its three neat diagrams ("Dancing Here") to be taken seriously, it is a neat little trick. It echoes the preoccupation with architectural construction that is reflected in the title (a reference to a building technique using compacted earth) and in the choreography. And by overtly requiring the audience to participate in the flow of the work and respond to the dancers' commands to change position, Mr. O'Connor subtly confuses expectations about performance and audience passivity.

And that was all before the piece had even started. When it did, "Rammed Earth" showed almost immediately why Mr. O'Connor is an important artist. His work, like that of the English choreographer Jonathan Burrows, is full of dry, rigorous, almost mathematical movement detail, with apparently little emphasis on theatrical projection or context.

After an opening section in which his four dancers - Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams - walk and run at varying tempos among chairs scattered about the room, they begin a synchronized sequence that is full of little limps and dips, crouches and freezes.

When they start, it looks simple; by the end of the 60-minute piece, Mr. O'Connor has drawn endless variations and rhythmic complexities from these small, minimal movements and gestures.

Even more astonishingly, he has allowed emotion to bloom from the affectless, abstract movement by seeding tiny encounters and confrontations throughout a work in which the dancers have little direct physical contact. Their blank, expressionless miens never change, but the intentness of their purpose gradually brings a weight of meaning to their actions that is both powerful and, at the end - when Ms. Olson and Mr. Rogers quietly embrace - moving.

At moments like these, dance, like poetry, can give evanescent form to what is inexplicable and indefinable. And "Rammed Earth" is indeed a kind of poem in which all the elements - a fine electronic score by James Baker; remarkably evocative lighting using fairly basic means by Brian MacDevitt and Michael O'Connor; and the focus and individuality of the dancers - seem just right.

Like much poetry, it's an intimate affair, and its smallness of scale may keep Mr. O'Connor's career more tethered to the experimental arena than he deserves. (One of the pleasures of "Rammed Earth" is the way it is both tough and accessible.) But for those who can find a seat (and remember where to move it) at the Chocolate Factory, it's an austere testament to the remarkable possibilities of dance.

Claudia La Rocco, The New York Times - September 29, 2007

Sept. 17 was a good day for Luciana Achugar, a choreographer known for smart, sensual dances that explore the nature of shared experience between audience and performer.

First she made her debut at the Joyce Theater, performing an excerpt from her 2004 work "A Super Natural Return to Love" at the New York Dance and Performance Awards, better known as the Bessies. Then she won a Bessie for creator/choreographer, for last year's seductive ensemble piece "Exhausting Love" at Danspace Project.

Ms. Achugar, who has shown her work at small, progressive theaters like Danspace Project and Dance Theater Workshop during her eight-year choreographic career, could leverage this recognition to move onto bigger stages. But only if she wants to.

"I'm not interested in going larger and larger," Ms. Achugar said. Nor are many of today's most interesting choreographers, who are thoughtfully engaged in navigating, and subverting, viewer expectations. Among them are Tere O'Connor, whose new project, "Rammed Earth," is at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens, and John Jasperse, who will bring a new work to the Next Wave Festival at the Brooklyn Academy of Music next month.

For reasons both artistic and economic, many contemporary choreographers have abandoned the idea of a hierarchical presentational model, one that begins in "emerging choreographer" samplers, extends through midsize theaters like the Joyce and then ascends to spaces like the Brooklyn Academy of Music.

Next season Ms. Achugar is planning to perform in one of the Workshop's small upstairs studios. Beyond aesthetics, she said, her position has philosophical and political dimensions.

"It's against the supersizing mindset," she explained. "Dance has this thing that is anti-consumerist or anti-capitalist. It's about the body, these relationships and these experiences" between viewers and dancers.

Of course, even dance behemoths like American Ballet Theater and Mark Morris Dance Group see the benefits of intimate stages. Mr. Morris regularly shows smaller repertory pieces in his Brooklyn center, and next month Ballet Theater will celebrate its 10th anniversary performing at City Center - a small stage compared with the cavernous Metropolitan Opera House, where the company has its spring seasons, but still a very traditional theatrical space, and one that many choreographers find frustratingly outmoded.

"I think, unfortunately, most dance on big stages looks exactly the same," Mr. O'Connor said. "I often say it looks like a bunch of No. 2 pencils in an earthquake. Mostly what you see is the human form against the enormity of the space. That is the major message in most of those works; it's the major excitement in most of those works."

Viewers, he said, see this standardized message and not the choreographer's "individual ideas."

Mr. O'Connor has worked on big proscenium stages, choreographing dances for companies like the Lyon Opera Ballet. But for the New York premiere of "Rammed Earth" he approached the Chocolate Factory, an alternative, artist-run space.

The piece, which is ripe with architectural metaphors, opened this month in a warehouse at the Philadelphia Live Arts Festival. At a studio showing in August, Mr. O'Connor discussed the idea of "liquid space," which allows the piece to maintain its architectural integrity in widely varying places - even, he said, a proscenium stage.

But it is difficult to imagine the work being as bewitching - or as spatially smart - in a traditional proscenium setting, particularly in the opening section, where the four performers dance around the viewers' chairs, unless Mr. O'Connor were to move the audience onto the stage as well, as Miguel Gutierrez did in his last work, "Everyone."

The Chocolate Factory's artistic director, Brian Rogers, who was one of its founders in 2003, has been aggressively seeking to work with established theaters like Danspace Project, a co-presenter of "Rammed Earth." He said choreographers' growing interest in alternative spaces corresponded to the rising cachet of series outside Manhattan, like Chez Bushwick in Brooklyn, and many younger people's lack of interest in traditional theatergoing.

"Sitting in a chair for a fixed period of time, and being quiet and then applauding" feels wrong to them, he explained. "It does to me, too, which is why I have the kind of space that I have. It can be anything you want it to be. You can throw away, if you want to, or try to throw away, all of the preassociations that people have about what it means to go and see a show."

Mr. Jasperse, who ricochets between big and small stages, has been playing with these pre-associations for years. His 2003 work "Just Two Dancers," in which viewers were instructed to hold mirrors to see dance happening throughout the theater, offered a critique of the new Dance Theater Workshop stage, whose traditional design, with wings and tiered seating, has struck many - including the Workshop's current artistic director, Carla Peterson - as limited and making too many assumptions about what kind of dance will be shown on it.

Mr. Jasperse's "Misuse liable to prosecution," which opens at the Brooklyn Academy in October, will juxtapose his beautifully precise movement language with a mess of found - or stolen - junk. But the greater juxtaposition will be of institution and art.

The academy's traditional "physical architecture of two enormous proscenium theaters with really expensive union crews" is at odds with the Next Wave mission of presenting experimental work, Mr. Jasperse said. But, he continued, this "crazy tension" can work to an artist's advantage.

To present "Misuse" in an "alternative, grungy environment" would miss the point, he said. "What's going to happen when we put that show in that theater?" he asked. "How do you manipulate the machine? It's there and it's designed to do a certain thing, but it doesn't necessarily mean you have to do that."

September 2007

Gia Kourlas, Time Out NY - September 20, 2007

In Rammed Earth, Tere O'Connor pays homage to the titular building technique, which dates back to ancient Roman times. "You add water to dirt that is on-site and create the material for the walls," he explains over tea near his West Village apartment. "So you lift the building right out of the space."

For his new quartet, which features Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers and Christopher Williams, O'Connor has traded his usual proscenium setting for the intimate space of the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City. As the audience moves in different configurations�alternately surrounded by the dancers, facing them as they move against a wall or placed apart at a far diagonal � he challenges spatial perception. "The thing for me is the idea of making something from where you are, in the site that you are in, with the people you're with and in the moment that you're in," he says. "Just raising it up. That's what I'm trying to do in my dances."

Rammed Earth, as O'Connor sees it, marks a shift in his choreographic formalism; his aim in the dance is to allow the movement and structure to emerge naturally, as opposed to having them begin from a point of calculated craft. "It's still formal," he says. "Everything is. But I'm interested in a kind of liquid space."

One of his key concepts relies on the similarity between walking through a building and sitting and watching a dance. "It's about how you negotiate the space of a building, which happens through time as you walk through it, and the experience of a dance happening to you through time as you sit in front of it," he explains. "Say there's a building: In this piece, the notion of liquid space comes from the idea of how differently everybody walks through that building. The space is solid, but your perception of it is fluid and changing - that's something that I've really been interested in in dance for a long time. I think I'm trying to turn the volume up on that in this piece."

Essentially, the audience, which is instructed to shift its seating throughout the performance, navigates through the Chocolate Factory alongside the dancers. "I'm trying to bring into evidence ideas about how what is happening in the architecture around you is a form of control," he says. "To make that watery or liquid is one of the root metaphors for dance. You can choose to look differently at structures that control you. I'm also really interested in the ideas of liquid perception: What do you take in? What do you remember when you're watching something onstage�or even during a typical day? What do you place importance on or not? I don't want this dance to exist in a closed space."

Concurrently, O'Connor's choreographic process has shifted in Rammed Earth; while he has made some of the movement, his dancers have contributed a great deal as well. In addition, some of it is improvised. "What I am doing is arranging when the space can be three-dimensional, when it's directional and when I want to push a reference, like a domestic or geometric shape," O'Connor explains. "There are times in which the dance collects itself and shows legible moments. I think that's what the mind does, too. Half of what you do in a day you don't understand at all�and then things come into focus. That's how dance also reflects experience for me. In that way, the work finds a context for moments as opposed to editing things in and out according to some random ideas of good and bad that I have."

In Rammed Earth, O'Connor has also moved away from his somewhat standard practice of creating characters-no matter how fleeting and nonsensical-for his dancers to embody. "I was starting to feel those were stylistic choices that I could pull out of my hat," he says. "I'm always trying to unearth another way. I think it's a really basic need for an artist: to see things in a different way all the time. For me it is more and more important to ask, What else is here? All the work that I really respect in the world goes through huge changes. Somehow even the politics of saying, 'I found this thing I'm good at, and now I'm going to show it to you,' seem hollow. It feels something like virtuosity, which is not my friend. That's just not a part of what I'm trying to be on earth doing."

September 5-11, 2007

Short video piece I made for Yehuda Duenyas' "One Million Forgotten Moments":

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