I want to start by admitting that I am indeed the Theater Manager at CounterPULSE and no I was not prodded to post this. But being in that position allows me a sometimes rare opportunity to see the progression of the shows and the space from one week to the next and it continues to amaze me how versatile our environment can be.
I want to applaud Leslie Seiters and the Little Known Dance Co. for stretching their imaginations and in doing so stretching our space to meet her needs. Too often I hear of artists going into a space and trying to determine how their show can fit into a fixed performance venue. Leslie took the opposite approach: how can I make this space do what I want it to do. And the payoff was fantastic.
Just to put this in context a few weeks ago I popped down on the weekend to see the Punany Poets. They had used all of our black curtains and just a few select spotlights with really saturated colors to give a real sense of intimacy and ambiance that really worked for their show. Fast forward to last weekend and you wouldn’t even recognize the place. Leslie took down every single black curtain we owned, imported her own specially crafted white flooring and in addition to that used absolutely every piece of space she could, including the lobby, kitchen and bathrooms. To top that off the dancers built large structures, reaching nearly to the ceiling, by stacking tables and large oddly shaped boxes that just added an additional layer to the piece.
Coming from the tech end of things items like sets and lights tend to be the first thing to enter my mind, but it was by no means the only engaging or provocative aspect of Leslie’s show. Her dancers, freed from limitation by the space, put together some beautiful images and evocative sequences combining their bodies with the use of props to create a new world in which we the audience were invited to live and breathe for a few precious moments on a Friday evening.
To be fair I wasn’t sold on every aspect of the show. I took issue with aspects of the sound design, which at times seemed inappropriately heavy for the playfulness taking place on stage. There were also a few costuming and prop selections that made me question the message those choices were attempting to make. But this feels like I’m splitting hairs. Inevitably I have to applaud Leslie and her dancers for making choices and for making strong choices. We have all attended those shows where no one has much to talk about following the performance. This was not one of those shows. Leslie left me bursting with the desire to dissect every little piece of the show and indeed I was still eager to talk about it many hours later when my girlfriend returned home from work.
There is nothing more re-invigorating than attending a show that challenges you as an audience member and provokes conversation, but after all that is part of our mission at CounterPULSE and Leslie really helped us to realize that vision last weekend. If you missed it all I can say is…you missed it.
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I agree that some of the costuming was confusing. It was hard to see where the box-builder and the sound-maker fit into the piece because of their outfits…
BUT
the sound was my favorite part. I actually did not interpret all of the performance as containing a sustained register of playful energy. To be sure, there were moments when I laughed out loud (like when the two dancers were being pushed and prodded on the tables like dolls to advertising jingle-esque music). But even those were tinged with the heaviness of this theme of impossible measurement and value. I kept returning to what Matthew Ghoulish of Goat Island refers to as ‘excess’ – the moment when bodies, numbers, and experiences pass the point of repetitiveness and enter the world of horrifying redundancy. That’s why my favorite moment of the night occurred when contact mics were stuck to the tables so that they picked up the dancers movements with deafening detail. It created an uncomfortable balance between the pleasure I got from the cleverness of this audio/visual approach to movement and the seriousness of excess in relation to bodies.
Being a would-be professional (or is it “would being”?) who works with measurement theory and does quantitative analysis, and having a particular interest in pushing the envelope into areas considered sacrosanct, i.e. beyond where measurement is typically used, I was disappointed. This is not saying much, as I am usually enthralled by Leslie’s work, so anything would be disappointing, except that this, too, was Leslie’s work, at least partly. It wasn’t as good as what I am used to from her.
I often have this reaction, though, when viewing work intended to address some “societal issue” or other, especially issues in the areas I tend to know a lot about (a piece about economics in one of those free work-in-progress days at CP a couple o’ years ago also falls into this bin). For one thing, the critique is usually not very incisive. To really critique economics, for instance, you’ve got to know a lot about it (McCloskey writes a good critique of economics), and by that I mean, be trained in it, be publishing in the field, etc. Most dancers don’t have time, which is understandable, but they also don’t invite a competent consultant, which is not. So they go for the low-hanging fruit, and that’s boring.
For another thing, even if such issue-oriented art could be done well on the issue side, which I have yet to see, the issue-orientedness tail ends up wagging the art dog. The art becomes this heavy-handed, knock-you-over-the-head-with-clumsy-visual-metaphors stuff (walking on telephone books, shredding them, anyone?). I liked Leslie’s other stuff because it didn’t have some big, cumbersome message it was trying to get across. As a result, it was much more powerful work.
For example, the obvious similies between measurement and death. Yawn. That’s so cliche. Why, why, why? I mean, Henri Bergson wrote about that over 100 years ago, and he is a philosopher. Yeats opined about it. Metropolis, etc., beat it to death (so to speak). Can we, please, get over it, and move on to something less predictable? (And personally, I think there’s a lot that’s lively and surprising about measurement. BIAS BIAS BIAS BIAS.)