Performing Arts

The Walker Art Center and Southern Theater are pleased to announce the recipients of the 2006 Momentum: New Dance Works commissions. The proposals and work samples were carefully considered by a panel composed of the Southern Theater's Jeff Bartlett, Walker Art Center's Philip Bither, and 2006 ad hoc panelist Kristin Van Loon of HIJACK. The following four artists/companies will be presented at the Southern Theater over two weekends in mid-summer 2006:

Karen Sherman
Live Action Set & Spaghetti Western String Co.
Leah Nelson
The BodyCartography Project

In this fifth year of the series, applications were numerous and of outstanding quality, making the selection process extremely competitive. We would like to thank all the artists for the time and energy invested in this application process, and congratulate the recipients on their achievement!

The following review is courtesy of Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse, Co-Artistic Directors of Off-Leash Area

Paul Herwig
Technically the production was really impressive, but the performance side of the production was not engaging to me. Maybe that was a self-conscious choice?

Jennifer Ilse
Yes, technically it was truly fantastic, and not just technologically, not just the dazzling pizzaz of computer images, but the way it was integrated with the performance of the live actors. But, also, yes - the characters & situations were largely based on the latest stereotypes by the political left. As a person on the political left myself, I wasn’t given anything new to discover, neither broader viewpoints nor deeper explorations of the familiar.

Paul
Yes, I think it’s universally accepted that strangers having access to our personal lives is dangerous, but there was no deeply felt threat in the situations that were presented. On a human level isn’t being helplessly absorbed, abused, and spat out by the information age horrible and terrifying?

Jennifer
Yes, the production was sort of high-end technical art “light” - but still exceptionally accomplished. Perhaps this is exactly what they were trying to do, but I couldn’t help but search for something deeper emotionally or intellectually due to the mere subject matter.

Paul
The production’s promotional image that I saw of a character standing in the midst of what seemed to be a three-dimensional digital environment was really exciting to me, something I could place myself inside of with my imagination, but on the stage everything was very flat: the staging, the actual scenic design, and the theatricality.

Jennifer
Hmm - yeah, the difficulty I see in merging live performance with media is that performance can be really strong for all the reasons we love live performance, which can make the media visuals seem disconnected and flat. The Builders Association perhaps chose to eliminate many of the aspects of engaging live performance in order to have the two, media and live performance, meet at a more centralized point, which in this show created an effect of the performers seeming like mere 2-D images in a 2-D environment, and so very integrated. Perhaps that itself is a statement about the subject matter - the reduction of humans to mere bits of 2-D data.

Paul
For me this production was clearly the most successful example of merging live 3-D performers and 2-D screen media that I’ve seen, but in the end I felt the production’s point of view didn’t transcend its devices.

Jennifer
All right, a summary then! See the show if you want to see what is touring on the leading edge of multi-media performance work and want a truly unique visual experience, and perhaps other audience members would disagree, but the content wasn’t challenging in itself nor was it presented in a way that may leave the audience thinking or feeling different about the world of electronic data we live in.

Off-Leash Area: Contemporary Performance Works is an interdisciplinary, physically based performance company in Minneapolis…< a href=”http://www.offleasharea.org”>

The following review is courtesy of John Munger, Director of Research and Information, Dance USA

A century and a quarter ago William Henley wrote, "I am the master of my fate: I am the captain of my soul." He captured a dominant world-view of his time. Super Vision makes the case in an 80-minute multi-media work that Henley's view no longer applies, whether we like it or not.

It's hard to be the captain of your soul when a "Border Agent" stamping passports knows more about your medical history than you do. Hard to be the master of your fate when you're $478,000 in debt before the age of nine. Hard to be master or captain of anything when you can't even establish that you've never been to Dubuque.

Individuals in three unconnected story lines struggle to resist a pervasive loss of autonomy. The husband in an upscale family of three lives at his computer trying to juggle money and identity. A Sri Lankan grandmother tries to affirm the human details of her life in extended video-phone conversations with her granddaughter in New York. An international business traveler endures repeated encounters with officious border agents who question details of his life.

Relentless questions, and resistance to answering them, are two themes stitching this multi-layered work together. There are so many layers, all purporting to be "reality." We see actors sitting behind working desks of electronic equipment speaking into cams that project onto a huge upstage screen to hold dialogues with live actors, in the space between, who in turn respond to images on their own computers that include projections of their own faces on the monitors watched by the actors behind the desks. There. Did I lose you? My point exactly.

The Sri Lankan grandmother was wonderful in many ways. But the real star of the show was a tour-de-force fandango of multi-media artistry including lights, sound, video, animation, projections and the kitchen sink. Human individuals became helpless data-bits flying through space like points on a traffic controller's radar grid.

Opening night of SUPER VISION (newest theater/new-media/spectacle work about "dataveillance" by The Builders Association and dbox) is just hours away. Since announcement of the work's topic many months ago, my awareness of surveillance in general and the resulting paranoia has seen new heights.

As a performer, surveillance doesn't bother me when I am notified of, and consent to, it. I am also aware that when I look beyond the stage lights into an audience and see that steady red pin-point of light, my performance tends to morph as I question my audience - am I performing for the group present, or am I performing for those who will see this on video (stage and film requiring different acting techniques)? That said, how does the awareness of surveillance affect us when walking down Hennepin Avenue, or into an elevator, or bank lobby, or grocery store parking lot, or even the Walker Art Center? Does this awareness change our daily performance? Do we find ourselves unwittingly putting on a show?

Enter the Sweat Anticon: a hooded sweatshirt that zips up to the top of the hood, leaving only eyeholes for the wearer to see out - effectively blocking the view of Big Brother. Good for anonymity, bad for a visit from the Department of Homeland Security. Interesting how the mere act of wearing such a garment and taking advantage of the ability to see but not be seen turns the wearer into the very thing he was attempting to evade. The watched is now the watcher.

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