Dance Between Performance and Image

I’m lying on my back on a black floor, backstage and behind the scrim in the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Fishman Space, watching and listening to Bodycast: An Artist Lecture by Suzanne Bocanegra starring Frances McDormand. It’s not the usual critical vantage point: I’m waiting for an entrance. My cameo comes halfway through, after St. Agnes in Agony’s story, during a section called “Little Dot,” named after one of Suzanne’s performance installations in which ballerinas in pointe shoes tapped out the dots of a George Seurat painting over a period of twelve hours. I pull myself up from the floor and prepare to enter when the title pops up on the screen, which to me reads: “toD elttiL.”

Singer Theo Bleckmann, the other guest artist, joins me quietly on my left. We watch the show backwards, sitting three feet from the projection screen, looking at the images flipped and significantly blown up in scale. We can’t see Suzanne or Frances, but we can follow the rhythms of their exchange. Suzanne reads the lecture in a low murmur that is piped into a microphone in Frances’s ear, and Frances in turn enlivens and complicates those words with her delivery. Under the direction of Paul Lazar, this game of Telephone animates language, giving Suzanne’s reflections another layer of meaning through her self-remove.

Among other themes, Bodycast presents images of beauty, particularly female beauty in its pervasive and constricting forms across the ages, from the Venus de Milo to the Kilgore Rangerettes. The accompanying slides visualize an array of cultural references: Our Bodies Ourselves, UPS uniforms, homemade tartans, a Titian self-portrait, George Balanchine on the January 25, 1954 cover of Time, a young woman scraped and sculpted by Eastern European nurses into a body cast.

As in Bodycast, the performances I witnessed this fall all responded to images — aesthetic and political, accompanying or embodied, often conflicting, forming a cultural history of Fall 2013 as much personal as it is public.

In contrast to Bocanegra, French choreographer Boris Charmatz briskly skims still images of Merce Cunningham’s choreography to create his piece Flip Book, which he presented at MoMA. Charmatz and his dancers embody the poses depicted in photographs from David Vaughn’s Merce Cunningham: Fifty Years (1997), giving new life to Cunningham’s choreographic imagery, or so the reasoning went. The dancers, only one actually proficient in the Cunningham technique, move in and out of the “pictures” in varying ways, sometimes walking, running, or rolling in a face-to-face coupling. A second position plié with a tilt turns into a collage of gyrating pelvises. The dancers nervously tick their way into another tableau, and then jazz their way out. One image dissolves into a group improvisation, none more gleefully danced than the choreographer, who tossed around as if momentarily freed from the constraints he had set for himself.

Unable to transcend its influences, Flip Book reads like a naïve and hackneyed homage. Aside from the obvious post-modern dance strategies of appropriating still images and running the gamut from pedestrian activity to formal dance technique, the piece was indebted to Doris Humphrey’s mid-twentieth-century theory of choreography, in which space, quality, and dynamic vary in predictably ordered ways. Of course, this knock-off approach to dance making is partly the point, for what Charmatz has invented — the innovation that...