It can be a challenge, when writing about the work of other artists, to resist the urge to “solve” for it. I say this as a maker who is deeply invested in all the different tools that can be deployed and the myriad outcomes that become available depending on seemingly small decisions. (Let’s put that light here. Let’s add an extra camera… etc.) Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed, the new co-created dance/theater piece by David Neumann and Marcella Murray, which is being co-presented by the Chocolate Factory Theater and Abrons Arts Center and runs through January 25th, certainly tempts the maker and solver in me.
Press
“This marvelous space dedicated to dance and performance in Long Island City, Queens, has just purchased a permanent facility in the neighborhood, but for the time being its forward-thinking presentation will continue at its current home.” —Gia Kourlas, New York Times
Press & Reviews
“When did you first realize that you were white?” In “Distances Smaller Than This Are Not Confirmed,” David Neumann and Marcella Murray’s quiet, experimental dialogue about race, the question comes up again and again — she, a young black woman, posing it to him, a middle-aged white man who cannot answer it. Not that he doesn’t try, grasping for childhood anecdotes like the time in second grade that he mispronounced Niger and spurred a classroom lecture on civil rights.
If surveillance features centrally in the Republic’s training program, it is recast as an embodied personal project of retuning attention and awareness, rather than as a positivistic tool of disciplinary control. Yet Kosmas does not easily do away with this contradiction; her script’s insistence on tracking and assessing the continuously renewed present, occasionally bracketing it even, flirts with the groundlessness of amnesia, its relinquishing of history to oblivion.
A body is a mass of stories, each body unique in its collection. But that emergent individuality continuously circles back into the multiplicity of its sources. So, Valencia gives her all--or, at least, a fair representation of what all might be. And then she leads an exercise that draws the audience into this multiplicity as well. Now you, too--all of you--have joined her ensemble, joined with her voice, become her history and her future.
Whether rhythmically rearranging items or jerkily ambulating, Ms. Valencia moves with a vivid efficiency: solid, assured. Her dancing seems almost as tangible as the objects around her, as if it, too, could be bundled up and carried.
