City of No Illusions

Silo City, a hulking complex of mostly abandoned grain elevators, sits on the edge of Buffalo, New York like an abandoned fortress. A few nearby elevators still receive grain from the lake freighters that once made Buffalo a thriving port city, but now most are derelict — ruined remnants of a busier past, cathedrals dedicated to a god that failed. Grass sprouts wild over the rail tracks that shunted grain from warehouse to port; the skyscrapers of downtown loom grandly in the distance. It’s a lonely place, and a strangely beautiful one. A particularly American kind of ruin, history hangs thick over Silo City.

But Silo City, monument to better years, has also recently begun to testify to Buffalo’s resurgence, as a vital local artistic community has embraced the site’s decayed grandeur, transforming it into a thriving performance venue. One of the latest and biggest efforts in this program of civic renewal-through-art is local ensemble Torn Space’s mammoth outdoor spectacle Motion Picture, which had two performances at Silo City on August 20 and 21, 2013. Under the leadership of artistic director Dan Shanahan, the company has been investigating the aesthetic possibilities of Buffalo’s native resources: colossal architecture and vast, empty spaces. (The company will present a new site-generated performance in a disused warehouse on the Silo City site in August 2014.)

Today’s Buffalo is an underpopulated metropolis, a burgeoning small city — a nexus for medicine and education — housed in the shell of a much-larger one. Even at rush hour, its downtown can feel eerily empty. Gorgeous old buildings dating from the golden age of American urban architecture — think Frank Lloyd Wright, Eero Saarinen, and Louis Sullivan — abut vacant storefronts and boarded windows. But Buffalo’s emptiness is also a sign of opportunity: for every shuttered building, another is being renovated as loft residences or a boutique hotel. Turn a corner on a deserted block, and you might suddenly come upon a crowded bar or outpost art gallery. (A local blog tracks the city’s recovery under the title “Buffalo Rising.”)

Torn Space’s aesthetic translates this urban sparseness into stage images, putting vivid compositions far apart, and finding mournful echoes in the empty spaces in between. Motion Picture is conceived on a scale most theatre companies can only dream of: at Silo City, a massive row of concrete silos, looking like moldering Grecian columns, formed a back wall and projection screen for images thrown hundreds of feet high. The playing space, a grassy expanse at the foot of the monolithic siloes, receded into the horizon in both directions. There was room for soldiers to march, a horse to gallop through, and a helicopter to circle ominously above.

Motion Picture’s title and its huge “screen” evoke the nostalgic American idyll of a hot summer night at the drive-in. And that’s the way most of the audience arrived at the now-remote site — a reflection of Buffalo’s contemporary reality as a drive-in metropolis, the result of a long process of suburbanization that was both sign and symptom of the city’s collapse. But the evocation of summer filmgoing is also a clue to the piece’s structure. Motion Picture proceeds as a series of dream-like tableaux, moving pictures performed against booming voiceover or to the accompaniment of stirring music evoking the unbounded horizons of the nineteenth century (Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony rings out prominently). The piece doesn’t tell a narrative in any strictly linear way; rather, it aggregates suggestive images. A post-industrial landscape play, Motion Picture’s images reverberate against the desolation of Silo City itself, creating a mournful but ultimately celebratory civic ritual, a pageant of urban suffering and rebirth. Dwarfed by giant projections, drowned out by amplified soundscapes, the human figures are stubborn intrusions in a monumental landscape — almost too small, too fragile to be there. But they refuse to yield the stage.

To get to the performance site, you walk along a muddy gravel road, interrupted by upthrusting weeds, wending your way past chainlink fences and empty buildings, until you see...