Dance Day at The Kitchen

DANCE DAY AT THE KITCHEN Robert Coe The pleasure of the Kitchen's eight hour downtown dance sampler was the chance to discover the shape of a seventies artistic legacy in what had seemed, particularly at mid-decade, to be little more than kinesthetic afterthought. Twenty-four artists, most of whom emerged in New York during the decade, were given twenty minutes each to perform, a format ideal for reconsidering the predictability and designing preciousness to which some people think the experimerltal scene has succumbed. The sheer variety of CHARLES DENNIS the work proved the biggest surprise, clarifying as it did a continuing impetus to make it new and see what has been made-one homiletic sixties strategy still capable of fostering integrity and innovation. There was familiar expressionistlexperiential work, toeing the line between doing and being , dancing and behaving; work exploring the How and the When which remain at the bottom line of the downtown aesthetic. Along with Christina Svane's brash tomfoolery and Charles Dennis's schizie Paxtonian collaboration with found-objects-musician George Cartwright, the inimitable Simone Forti transformed the Kitchen into an imaginary Sahara, moving like a scorpion, a camel, a scarab, to the shrieks and howls of Peter Van Riper's saxophones. (I hope I have the animals right.) Yoshiko Chuma screened her black and white film, The Girl Can't Help It, 8 done with Jacob Burckhardt. It exploded the E= MC 2 theory of natural and human objects, in a style reminiscent of the old films of Neil Casady on amphetamine. The emphasis throughout the day and into the evening was on solos: 14 ofthem, with 6 works for couples and only 4 group pieces. Nearly half the dances were performed in silence, appropriate to the almost universal formal privatism. The exception to this and any other rule was Kenneth King as a prancing Jules Verne of Space City, signalling with gesture and a taped message his future for the art in outer space and New York City, not necessarily in that order. Karole Armitage of the Merce Cunningham Company transformed herself into a primitive tool, essaying random, abstract tasks with and around an assortment of household, urban and industrial objects. Unlike the Grand Union's seductive alchemy, Armitage kept her chores and violent phrasing utterly mundane. Molissa Fenley's Boca Raton, performed with Elizabeth Streb to drums and a repetitive rock riff, also sought a mesh with a rawer energy. Surprisingly, it was one of the few works which attempted, with fitful success, to organize itself into a spacious, repetitive floor design. Nancy Lewis did her familiar ironic dancerly ditzing around, negotiating personas , tossing them out, and ending up with an almost poignant dance about doing what she was doing there: performing. A pleasing discovery was Deborah Gladstein, whose liquid , sensuous solo was one of the only pure examples of what seemed in context an almost self-forgetful quality. The protean Cesc Gelabert, on the other hand, strung together enchainements as if they were amino acids, with facial expressions ranging from terror and amusement to benign apology. There was widespread concern with explicit gesture and with games-not solemn ritualistic ones, but games useful for making, thinkSUSAN ESCHELBACH, JANA JENSEN, CHARLES MOULTON Allowing for mistakes remains a cardinal downtown enthusiasm , a chance to see how things get put together though it's an idea which can be taken too far. NANUY LEWIS 9 SIMONE FORTI CHRISTINA SVANE There was a widespread concern with explicit gesture and with games . . . games useful for making, thinking, and experiencing the dances themselves. ing, and experiencing the dances themselves. Dana Reitz has become a master of gestural dance. Steps is no new direction for her but her richest, most sophisticated work to date: thinking with herhandsand feet, she plied the space softly as if it were a loom. Nancy Topf traced invisible lines and squiggles; Mary Overlie and Wendell Beavers accumulated mundane semaphoric postures and repeated them, like characters trapped in a RobbeGrillet novel. Charlie Moulton, Janna Jensen and Susan Eshelbach stood in a line and rapidly passed three balls between them. They kept dropping the balls. "This is a bitch," Moulton commented. "We wanna work it...