The Whitebox Project / Artcritical

Original article HERE

Noémie Lafrance, The Whitebox Project, dance performance at Black and White Gallery/ Project Space, Brooklyn, 2011

People gathered in the bleak concrete backyard of the Black and White Gallery, chatting in groups, milling about. “The Whitebox Project,” Noémie Lafrance’s performance piece, had already been described as being influenced by flash mobs, so everyone knew what was about to happen. Still, we stood and talked to one another in anticipation. The volume of human voices speaking out loud in the roofless room started to escalate unnaturally, to the point where to continue a conversation, you practically had to shout. Then the volume dropped drastically, and performers emerged from the mass of people, starting to make simple patterns of movement along the floors and walls.

Eventually, about 20 dancers revealed themselves to be a part of the piece, and proceeded to work their way through just about every existing postmodern dance reference. They walked, ran, talked, shouted, kicked, shimmied, sat down, stood up, laid down, and even created some strange cheerleader-like formations of movement and chanting. None of the sequences lasted too long—some of the performers undressed within the mob of people, a trope that didn’t shock and wasn’t tender or powerful, but did make me feel sorry for the dancers participating in the pretentious nod to vulnerability. They put their clothes back on; they herded us the way my parents’ border collie used to, running in circles around us a little too close for comfort, forcing a shift in location. They also encouraged us to join in and participate in the simple physical motions. I noticed one young woman who happily followed along with the Simon Says-like instructions from the score; most resisted.

At the post-show talk with the audience that comes at the end of every performance, and is actually a part of the piece, my fears about the breadth of the organizing concept for the project were confirmed. Underlying the somewhat interactive though hardly coercive gathering was a real desire to get the audience to dance. Lafrance and her dancers talked about the idea that once you “break the boundaries between audience and performer” or “challenge the conventions of the proscenium stage,” then the result will be a kind of physical participation by audience members—a democratization of the space whose perfect expression is the erasing of the distinction between performer and viewer. After over 60 years of this kind of thinking about the destabilization of theatrical conventions, including a popular resurgence in the 1990s, we’ve already had a backlash against it. Theorists have weighed in. Jacques Rancière pointed out, and I tend to agree, that there is nothing inherently wrong with recognizing the distinction between the roles of viewer and performer. What is wrong, he asserted in his book The Emancipation of the Spectator, is to assume that one role is less free, less powerful, or less interesting than another.

another view

As any critic will tell you, the experience of the viewer is always active—to initiate thought, to respond, and to feel are not verbs we should dismiss as non-participatory. Why, then, should viewers dance? And why should they be asked to verbally respond to the performance after the piece, in order to influence its future iterations? My problem with the concept of the piece—despite its often striking visuals and a few lovely experiential moments in space—can’t be removed from a general frustration with our culture of affirmation. We assume that we can judge success by how many people have jumped on in support and participation, and longwinded, inane comments are dutifully welcomed, as if they embody democracy itself. This kind of climate assures that no one gets heard; there’s a jumble of opinion, very little thought, and an overall lowering of the bar because of too much awareness of audience diversity and limitations. Ironically, in this piece, attempts to draw out active participation and response take away the true power of an audience member to have his or her own natural reaction to the visual material. I never liked to be talked down to as a child and I don’t appreciate it much now; if you’re giving viewers something to look at, step back and believe in their ability to see.

Charles Atlas Joints Array, in The Brooklyn Rail

At the Rail online HERE

NEW MUSEUM | JULY 7 – AUGUST 28, 2011

What’s in an elbow? The way it moves; the stretching of flesh over bones, then its gathering in tight wrinkles mid-limb. A knee: that complex, delicate system of ligaments that makes walking, running, dancing possible. But these images are non-specific—what of your own elbow? Your sister’s knee? Have you ever really looked at the wrist of someone you admire? I once noticed the way a man I love held a glass—his hand hinging with unconscious flourish—and it made me love him more.

People show themselves through their bodies as much as their minds: if you pay attention, you can see the world through a joint. Those who make their bodies into art are creating at the intersection of what is physically innate, tragically accidental, and tirelessly practiced. Seeing the body this way—as perfectly imperfect raw material—is a postmodern practice that came about in part from Anna Halprin, when she taught workshops to future Judson founders and other amazing people on her outdoor deck in Marin county in the 1960s and ’70s. When I visited her there last fall, the now 91-year-old, whose own joints remain a supple complement to her bright and impassioned mind, said she couldn’t even watch most of today’s dancers. They mask their instrument, themselves in their bodies, with slick technical training that makes the art that interests her impossible—the physical equivalent of commercial production techniques.

Merce Cunningham spent time in Halprin’s backyard workshops during the early years. I’ve seen videos of him leaping across the deck as a young man: already brilliant, seemingly fully formed, an unmistakable individual. Where Halprin and the postmoderns were interested in everyday movements as a way to reject stylized, expressive modernism, Cunningham famously embraced chance in order to move away from the same problem. He developed a specific strain of abstraction in dance that always seemed to point to something more. He knew innately what was in an elbow; that everything was already there. His work proved one needn’t pile on storylines and dramatic expressions of humanity when working with the most basic and personal of materials, the body.

From the beginning, Cunningham was interested in how the body related to technology, including computer programs for creating and recording dances. He pioneered, with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, media-dance, which is dance specifically for the camera. Before his time as the Cunningham company’s filmmaker-in-residence (1978 – 1983), when he made 10 dance films, Atlas was an assistant stage manager for the company, and was already filming Cunningham in little experimental movement studies during breaks from rehearsal. Since then, Atlas has shown video and performance works in museums and galleries all over the world, mostly in collaboration with choreographers and performers. To name just a few: Yvonne Rainer, Marina Abramović, Michael Clark, Douglas Dunn, John Kelly, and Leigh Bowery.

Atlas’s current show, Joints Array, on view in the lobby gallery of the New Museum, is made up of his first Cunningham experiments from the early 1970s, which were shot on Super 8 color film. He revisited these images in 2009 after the choreographer’s death, creating a four-channel installation called “Joints 4tet for Ensemble”(2010), which was on view at Vilma Gold Gallery in London in April. The piece on view at the New Museum is an extended version of this original. Differently sized outdated box monitors show film-transferred-to-video loops of Cunningham that create an incredibly beautiful portrait of an artist and a man. The videos show, alternately, close up images of a wrist, knee, ankle, and elbow.

Cunningham is not dancing in the films, but moving slightly, as if exploring in each instant the possibilities and the complexities of the joint in focus. Each of the monitors is set up at the top of its own individual pole, rooted in the floor along the perimeter of either one of the two back walls of the rectangular gallery space. Different videos play on the monitors at alternating times; the result is far from an overwhelming bombardment of moving images, as might be expected from so many videos playing simultaneously. Instead, the work feels quite intimate, capturing the essence of Cunningham, while skipping extraneous outlining and obvious description. There is also a rich and nostalgic texture to the visual information that comes from the film itself and the knobby, boxy black containers that house it.

At the end of each short clip, and before the next one starts, Atlas left several frames of lead tape, a brightly dated exposure of the technology itself. This technology forms a third personified character in the space, conversing in a timeless loop with Cunningham’s joints and Atlas’s ability to capture what may be abstract in form, but never in nature. Rounding out the experience are old, unpublished ambient noise recordings by John Cage that play in a loop in the gallery. You can hear the sound of the street, a car driving by, a faint honk, or the rustle of leaves meeting up with different, random points in the films. Atlas has confessed that when he was with the Cunningham company, he balked at the chance method; here, as in much of his recent video and performance work, he has, in a way, become more of a Cageian. The structure of Joints Array contains all of the right ingredients, but it’s the way he lets it be just a little bit wild in just the right way that turns a large formal display of video recordings of body parts into a living thing.