Casa, and: Metapolis Project 972 (review)

It is widely agreed that critical theory has taken a "spatial turn" in the last couple of decades, concentrating increasingly on how meanings are produced by spatial relationships rather than—the former pre-occupation—temporal ones. As a performance mode fundamentally structured around movement, time, and space, dance may not seem like it needed to take such a "turn." But contemporary dance companies including Brazil's Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker and Belgium's Charleroi/Danses-Plan K suggest otherwise. With their emphases on scenic space and architectural structure, these companies indicate not only that dance is in fact making a spatial turn, but also that it potentially has much to contribute to this new focus in critical thinking and artistic creation. From the contrasting evidence of these companies' work, one of the greatest contributions dance-in-architecture can make is to explore what social relationships built environments realistically and speculatively produce.

While Metapolis's structuring of space in exploring social relationships is extremely creative and suggestive, Casa's is correspondingly somewhat mundane. I hasten to add that this is intentional, at least in part. As its blunt, perfunctory title signifies, Casa's set suggests a house—any family's site of repetitive, everyday domesticity. This "house" is three stories tall and, like a doll's house, lacks a front so that its interior spaces and scenes can be viewed. In one sequence, fifteen performers create the vernacular movements of food preparation. The mechanical repetition of their actions invokes the routine and repetitive nature of domestic labor. In another scene, a performer exits upstage to stand under a shower. Her isolation at the base of the weighty house and the temporary stillness of the scene evokes the quiet, meditative beauty latent in the everyday activity of bathing. Other sequences explore the house as an ever-changing site of refuge, ease, relaxation, domestic conflict with men literally driving women up the wall, as illustrated in the Casa photograph, and intricately intertwined social activity, for example in the final sequence, when the performers swarm the three-tiered set like it was an infinitely well-organized, highly functional, and even a happy ant farm.

In exploring the banal, however, Casa occasionally succumbs to banality or, perhaps more precisely, becomes conservative. Thus, it neither fully develops some of the connections it makes (or could make) nor adequately examines some of its own assumptions. It begins to explore the house's role as a vehicle of concealment and revelation by opening and closing doors, windows, and a drawbridge, and by momentarily illuminating scenes performed behind opaque screens. But given the recent proliferation of television programs set in the household-under-constant-surveillance, Casa could usefully push further its observations about privacy and exposure, security and vulnerability, and interiority and exteriority. Likewise, it could be a little more self-reflexive about the stereotypical gender and (hetero)sexual dynamics of its domestic spaces, movement, and costuming. Two young men enter a room in the attic as the food preparation/kitchen sequence dominated by female performers/cooks concludes on the ground floor. They strip to their underpants and throw their trendy clothes on the floor. Conventional narrative sequencing, the gendered spatial division of the house, and consistent male/female duet coupling throughout the show make this house the site of the classic heterosexual family romance and make these characters teenage boys who create more work for their mother. In a different house, performed through different gender relations, it would not require a resistant reading to interpret these characters as a gay couple coming home.

Casa's use of scenic space is limited as a vehicle for exploring social relations, but it does provide an apparatus for the kind of work the Companhia de Dança Deborah Colker specializes in—aestheticized and celebratory displays of...