October 19, 2007

Interview with Chase Granoff and Chris Peck of Live Sh--, here.

Claudia La Rocco, NY Times - October 27, 2007

To hear the choreographer Deborah Hay talk, there is no overstating the connection between visual art and dance in New York in the 1960s, when the Judson Dance Theater movement was radically questioning the nature of performance.

"Year after year after year you would follow the openings, and the growth of an artist," she recalled, ticking off names like Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt and Robert Morris. "I could feel myself being altered chemically by what it was that I was looking at."

New Yorkers can see the results on Nov. 13, when a video of two of Ms. Hay's pioneering 1968 dances will be shown for the first time during Performa 07, the second biennial festival of new visual art performance, which opens today. Performa seeks to rekindle connections between the arts through discussions, screenings and new work.

Today's New York scene, in which the various art worlds and their audiences have largely retreated to their own corners, makes Ms. Hay's experience - which was just as powerful for many visual artists - sound like an impossible utopia.

"There seems to be little time spent either studying or taking in things that might be just to the left or the right of your primary interest," said Debra Singer, the Kitchen's executive director and chief curator. "In New York, we're so blessed with so much that you can indulge your primary passion." She added, "At the artist and audience level, almost ironically, it can perpetuate a kind of parochialism."

Yet the boundaries keep blurring. Ann Liv Young, a dancer by training, creates raunchy hybrids of musical theater, movement and text, controlling all aspects of her visually intricate spectacles. Visual artists employ dancers in their installations, and artists like Miranda July tackle everything from feature films to live action-video performances.

At its best, this fearless do-it-yourself aesthetic, which exists for reasons both artistic and economic, leads to wonderfully rich, unmediated worlds in which artists' ideas drive new creations. A recent example is Chase Granoff's and Jon Moniaci's "Boredom!!! (as an amplifier)" in May at the Chocolate Factory in Long Island City, Queens. Mr. Granoff, trained as a dancer and not as a musician, participated heavily in the live score.

The Chocolate Factory's artistic director, Brian Rogers, recalled that Mr. Granoff had taken heat from musicians for having the nerve to play guitar. For me, his consciously na�ve relationship to the instrument held much charm at a time when specialized, insider knowledge often obscures rather than enables artistic meaning. But I understand the resentment, having suffered through incredibly unsophisticated movement in gallery installations and untold dances employing video art that looked as if it had been made in 20 minutes on someone's home computer - and not in a good way.

A central Performa mission is to upend today's parochialism - as the festival's founder, RoseLee Goldberg, put it, "to open the doors and windows between the dance and art world, to find the conceptual underpinnings where there could be a crossover."

"How come this conversation was so profound and rich in the '60s and '70s?" she added. "Can we reinstigate that?"

There are obvious barriers, including visual art's astounding economic trajectory in the last few decades, while dance has remained among the have-nots of the arts. Still, though contemporary choreographers dismiss the notion, there are striking parallels between their concerns and those of the Judson era.

Much of today's best work is re-examining everything about performance. Just what is this pact that artists and audiences make? What is valuable about it? What are our expectations regarding virtuosity, our desires to be entertained? It is a quieter re-evaluation than what occurred during the '60s and '70s, which came complete with manifestoes, but the sense of a restless repositioning against an insular tradition is similarly vibrant.

This repositioning extends to language. Contemporary choreographers frequently express dissatisfaction with the terms choreography and dance, and the expectations they prompt.

"The word doesn't somehow acknowledge the different strategies people are using to think about or create their work," Miguel Gutierrez explained, referring to choreography. "If 'choreography' is simply about the arrangement of bodies in graphic space, then no, this doesn't adequately describe what I am interested in."

These categories seem particularly inadequate for performers in their 20s and early 30s, people like Mr. Granoff, Ms. Young or Levi Gonzalez - a new generation creating work without having served a long apprenticeship in a dance company, and distinctly uninterested in honing a specific movement technique. While Ms. Young, who spurns almost all art (and has been criticized for unknowingly recycling outdated theatrical ideas), is an extreme case, Mr. Gonzalez reflects a prevalent sensibility when he describes feeling more kinship with contemporary visual art and film than with conventional dance practices.

"Experimental dance doesn't have this baggage of a technique," he said. "There's something about the practice of making dance that seems to me really fluid in terms of what materials you can attach it to."

The danger, of course, is in getting lost in all this freedom. But that is also the excitement - for the makers, and for those watching.

October 27, 2007

More photos by Ryutaro, these are of Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, and Tere O'Connor respectively:

October 26, 2007

These photos of Christopher Williams were taken by Ryutaro Mishima, directly before and after his performance in Tere O'Connor's Rammed Earth:

Abigail Deutsch, The Village Voice - October 23, 2007

While Temporary Distortion's Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) probably leads somewhere, its audience ends up stranded on a shoulder, desperately consulting a map. This daring performance about memory and identity features six spooky-looking actors staring and speaking blankly while video footage of their experiences (from road trips to rapes) plays above their heads. Once we've discerned that these unnerving performers aren't planning to whip out pistols and sprinkle bullets into the audience (craggy-faced Ben Beckley seemed a likely suspect), we find ourselves entering their lonely, disoriented world. The show's gravity is such that the following line appears in a relatively lighthearted scene: "I am a man bewildered and incapable of remembering my many personal disasters, and therefore I am doomed to repeat them forever and ever into eternity." This solemnity does not bore; rather, the actors take their seriousness so seriously we can't help but do the same. A creeping amnesia haunts these characters, who complain they do not know who they are, what has happened, or what is happening now. Through its use of stage and screen, the production hints at relationships between plays and films, past and present, and reality and projection, ideas that squeeze in with the characters' concerns - entrapment, death - like passengers in an overstuffed car. Often, as actors whisper desperately and footage glows above them, countering or complicating or confusing their words, Welcome to Nowhere captures beautifully the psychic haziness it takes on as a major theme. Yet the story line, as fractured as the characters' emotional lives, remains just plain hazy.

Joseph Cermatori, The Brooklyn Rail - October 20, 2007

In the fiftieth anniversary year of Jack Kerouac's On the Road, the theme of road travel continues to loom large in the American imagination. This past June saw Atlantic Theater Company's production of 10 Million Miles, a road trip musical; in November, BAM features a commissioned work by Sufjan Stevens about the BQE. Fortunately, the contemporary theatrical avant garde has not missed this confluence. In October, the Queens-based performance ensemble Temporary Distortion brings its most recent project, a theatrical investigation of the road movie genre titled Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road), to The Chocolate Factory.

Since 2002, Temporary Distortion has created productions that vex the boundaries between live theater, sculpture, installation, and, most recently, film and video. Their last five projects shared a scenic concept that has become the group's trademark: a large boxlike structure composed of industrial piping, plexiglass facing, fluorescent tubing, light bulbs, undisguised microphones, surveillance cameras and video monitors. The productions take place within and around these confining-and coffining-boxes, which are often built to the exact dimensions of their inhabitants, and which recall Robert Morris's sculpture Box for Standing (1961) and the shadow box assemblages of Joseph Cornell. (The boxes are constructed in the living room of artistic director Kenneth Collins's apartment in Sunnyside, Queens. When I recently visited a rehearsal, the set took up half of the tiny room, and the complex system of electrical wiring seemed poised to cause a borough-wide brownout.) The actors speak from within these enclosures in ashen tones, often slowly, at a pianissimo, and with near absolute physical stillness.

Dramaturgically speaking, it's easy to recognize the influences at work. The group is young, and like so many contemporary theater artists in their twenties and thirties, they unhesitatingly acknowledge the inspiration of Foreman, LeCompte, and Wilson. (One also detects resonances with the work of artists from the generation after Foreman, et al.: for instance, Reza Abdoh, Sarah Kane, and Romeo Castellucci.) However, the group's entire body of work, especially Welcome to Nowhere, suggests another inspiration: Beckett. This, too, they readily admit-in fact, the text of their 2004 production Contingent cites Malone Dies explicitly with the line "'Nothing is more real than nothing' quoted Samuel Beckett." (Incidentally, another existentialist, Kafka, is also a noteworthy forebear: his novel The Trial provided the starting point for their first project, Alien Even Then [2002].)

Beckett's relationship to the road trip movie may seem surprising at first, but not when one remembers that the prototypes for Welcome to Nowhere's explorations-films such as Easy Rider and Bonnie and Clyde and their cinematic progeny-owe an unmistakable debt to Beckett's plays, chiefly Godot. Prior to the twentieth century, America's experience of its landscape was one of transcendental Romanticism, best articulated by the sounding of Whitman's barbaric yawp. With Godot (the third play Collins ever read, after Hamlet and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead), the situation reverses. Romantic individualism is replaced with mutually miserable codependence (we see this in On the Road as well, with its two male protagonists) and transcendence becomes impossible. Travel leads to no escape, to no coherent self, no exit, and no redemption, only to other "compartments." As Gogo puts it: "There's no lack of void."

This angst and antipathy make their way from absurdism into the anti-escapist road movies of 1960s and 70s America (where Temporary Distortion intercepts them)-expressive as they are of the severe emotional and political malaise of the time, long after Manifest Destiny and the illusions of meaningfulness it offered had exhausted themselves. Following the automobile boom of the first half of the twentieth century, young Americans found themselves more capable of long-distance travel than any previous generation, but also without any apparent direction, spiritual or geographical (the era of "Go west, young man" long having passed). Bonded in their individual isolation, Didi and Gogo replicate themselves repeatedly in the iconic guise of the road trip duo, forced into perpetual, nomadic self-exile, disenchanted by the ideology of destination, and, essentially, going nowhere in spite of all their movement.

The staging of Welcome to Nowhere reflects this dual sense of traveling and stasis (the simultaneous experience of which is uniquely modern, thanks to technological developments in transportation, film, video games, and, ultimately, the Internet and Second Life). It's true that Collins's approach here feels slightly easier than in past projects: "more naturalistic," as he describes it, "and with more situation and plot," though wandering in its approach to narrative. Nevertheless, the actors remain distant and relatively motionless throughout, except for a few changes of position. Above their heads, an ever-shifting phantasmagoria of projected video images, courtesy of video designer William Cusick, plays in widescreen format, signifying different locales and creating movement in marked opposition to the actors' implacable stillness.

The video opens on the scene of a desolate country road (c.f., Godot) with a decomposing pickup on the shoulder. The performance has hardly begun, and we already feel the weight of some violent trauma or inexpiable crime. Cusick's graphics locate us in a surreal world of disjointed dreams and memories. At one point, the film shifts, and we find ourselves in what feels like a nightmare: it is night, we're driving through a forest, we feel that we're fleeing something unspeakably dreadful, the road before us is in darkness, it remains obscure no matter how far we follow it, vanishing beyond our headlights. We feel intimately that, in Welcome to Nowhere, the nearer we get to our destination, to coherent memory, and consequently to the truth, the more it retreats into the darkness just beyond our grasp. In short, the production's prevailing metaphor and obsession is traveler's amnesia.

Temporary Distortion's technology fetish belies its ostensible commitment to what it has called, somewhat confusingly, "pure minimalism"-the use of stage machines and the spectacle they consequently produce betray a far more baroque sensitivity. This technophilia continually asserts the existentially mechanical nature of the body. Moreover, the automatism of the actors insinuates more than a dehumanizing fusion of car and driver, man and machine (as in Beckett again, e.g. Krapp's Last Tape). It also feels like the forced, purgatorial narration of self and past (c.f. Play, What Where, and Not I). These themes and tropes may seem like absurdism's leftovers, but Collins and his company employ them in ways that feel startlingly novel.

For all Temporary Distortion's recent shifts toward a more naturalistic style, its performers do not portray characters in any traditional, psychological sense. Rather, they exhibit a quality of self-abstraction, of self-forgetfulness, and, as the play progresses, the character identities begin to blur and resist coherence. A hallucinatory film sequence depicts one character, Hunter, digging with a large shovel in the forest, and one's mind is left to wonder whether it is he or another character, Wyatt, doing the excavating; whether he is exhuming something or burying something; and whether that something is the past, the truth, an authentic self, or a rotting corpse.

Welcome to Nowhere, with its centered, Zen deliberateness, is specifically intended to allow for moments of reverie like this. Indeed, the company has suggested that their theater-a "theater of stillness"-is designed in part to provoke "a liquid sort of thinking that allows you to drift in and out of places while watching the performance," and to extricate its audience, however temporarily, from the catastrophic speed, business, and acceleration of modern life. In this regard, Welcome to Nowhere shows much potential to succeed.

John Del Signore, Gothamist - October 12, 2007

Temporary Distortion's Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) juxtaposes lushly photographed cinema with hypnotic live performance. Positioned within a small but elaborately designed boxlike installation, the actors draw the audience into their blood-stained world with a stillness that approaches meditation. When fused with the rich film projection above their heads - which furthers the abstract plot of the road movie/love story - the show draws you into an intimate embrace, as if the characters are whispering in your ear while you watch their dreams.

Rehearsal video - October 2007

October 12, 2007

Temporary Distortion's Welcome to Nowhere (bullet hole road) is the sort of show that allows for drifting in and out of concentration - that's the plan. The shifting focus adds to the nightmarish plot about a man lost in his murderous travels across America. The set is integral, mixing up cinematic and semiotic elements for the audience to interpret freely. Welcome's central theme of grappling with inner demons is literally projected onto the audience via a mirror at the back of the stage, inviting questions of whether we are all haunted by our own shortcomings.

Deborah Jowitt, The Village Voice - October 2, 2007

Build a wooden frame and fill it with dirt and water. Stir. Tamp down hard. Let dry. Keep this up and you'll have a rammed earth house. Tere O'Connor calls his new dance Rammed Earth because, like this primal home, it springs from its environment. O'Connor molded his choreography in the Chocolate Factory's stripped-down space-a long, narrow studio with white brick walls, old steam radiators, metal folding chairs, and incandescent bulbs hanging overhead in plastic cages. By asking us audience members to cart our chairs to several locations, he creates shifting architectural perspectives on both the space and the performance.

Initially, the chairs (35 or so) are scattered around the room, facing different directions. Hilary Clark, Heather Olson, Matthew Rogers, and Christopher Williams begin by threading their way among them - first wandering slowly, then eventually running so swiftly that we can feel the breeze of their passage. The lighting by Brian MacDevitt and Michael O'Connor turns the walls blue, and before James Baker's elegantly designed sound score kicks in, the performers' rhythms animate the space. At one point, Rogers is dancing about 16 inches from my feet.

When we sit lined up along one of the room's long walls, the dancers make use of the other one as a point of departure and a support. In the third section, we divide into two groups and sit at the short ends of the space; now we're part of the background for those opposite us. The performers emphasize the length of the room by running forward, then backward in long, curving paths. For the final part, we all sit at the far wall; we can see past the dancing to the dark entryway and the street beyond.

O'Connor's choreography for the hour-plus evening (two shows a night) is as profoundly interesting as the dancers. These four are as forthright in bold, unusual, witty passages of choreography as they are when executing pedestrian moves or meaningful gestures. What might be events and rhythms from daily life appear disconnectedly, fluidly, the way they might in dreams or memories. Images surface and disappear without transitions or repercussions. We might be working a TV remote. Clark manipulates Williams's arms; seconds later, we're watching what resembles a deranged contra dance. Yet O'Connor shapes his material so skillfully that the evening doesn't seem like a string of non sequiturs; the structural connections between fleeting events and his overarching design - along with the carefully designed effects of lighting, sound, and altered perspectives-make us feel we're experiencing something that, however enigmatic, mirrors the processes we live with from moment to moment.

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Live Sh-- Alternative Presenter Fair

1/10 & 1/11 2009

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February 17 2009, 7PM