Dance Under Performa's Umbrella (review)

Art & Performance Notes

Children from the Makana District sew sneakers in hell in Brett Bailey and Third World Bunfight's site-specific Orfeus. Photo: Courtesy Alexandra Westcott.

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Under the directorship of RoseLee Goldberg PERFORMA 07 smudges the marker between performance and visual arts, serving as a much needed bridge between dance and "art." Dance has long suffered the perception that it is not as serious or sophisticated an art, that it precludes the cerebral. But the biennial provides an entry for moving bodies into the exclusive parameters of serious fine art by applying art's philosophical or aesthetic reference points and spurring opportunity for dialogue.

Filmmaker Isaac Julien's collaboration with Russell Maliphant in the trilogy Cast No Shadow, an installation of film and live dance, explores the possibilities in this merger. Today's sophisticated technology, and money from the PERFORMA commission, BAM, and Sadler Wells allow his innovation, in which dancers from the Russell Maliphant Dance Company and Vanessa Myrie perform live, in the work. Some of the most notable precedents include Ohad Naharin's recent Telophaza, -Trisha Brown's collaborations with Robert Rauschenberg, and Loie Fuller, who at the turn of the last century worked with filmic visuals and dance.

In Julien's concurrent exhibit at Metro Pictures in Chelsea, Western Union: Small Boats, we can see the mutability of the work, how it can be taken apart and rearranged to suit different contexts, audiences, and houses—theatre, museum, gallery, corporate lobby, Times Square. Continuous loops on three screens offer a collage of images with a satisfying narrative structure in eighteen minutes, excerpting the full performance at BAM.

The BAM trilogy, Cast No Shadow , requires a full commitment for ninety minutes (with intermission.) It begins with True North, Julien's 2004 film inspired by forgotten African-American explorer Matthew Henson, who is now credited with discovering the North Pole. The film was reworked with Maliphant as a performance dance. Three males, Alexander Varona, Kyoung-Shin Kim, and Ricardo Meneghini perform contact improvisation moves, influenced by martial arts. It's very energetic and sublimely acrobatic. They push hands and flip off each other's backs. The sound includes Josette Simon reading from Robert H. Fowler's 1953 interview with Henson, published in American History Illustrated in 1966: "My soul will never get no peace."

On three screens there are chilly bluish images of the icy North, igloos, and waterfalls. The performers are sometimes shadow images on the screens. In white dress the statuesque black model Myrie weaves slowly and elegantly through the activity, on screen and on the stage. That she is in the audience creates yet another version of her presence. We imagine hers is the voice recorded reading Henson's words rather than the unseen Simon. With the silhouettes and the live performers, reality—the here and now—is confused with the pre-filmed images of the dancers. And this confusion is bolstered by the awesome manner in which the figures appear to time travel between real and video, stepping in and out of the "picture plane" created by the screened projections. (Considered the first cinematographer, Fuller had worked with the idea of the body appearing and disappearing, using framed and projected light according to the technology of her time).

In True North the dancing trio expresses the spirit of adventure and discovery, including its egoism and the dynamics of the collaborators: between the dancers on stage and between the explorers in pursuit of "true north." They are lifted and carried, illustrating the Herculean, or Sisyphean accomplishment of their expedition, and also foreshadowing Cast No Shadow's tragic theme of shattered hopes and dreams.

The camera pans over scenes of icebergs to music by Paul Schütze. One long tone rings in the ears while "I think I'm the first man to sit...