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Working-Class Grace: Kenneth Parris on sketching the Merce Cunningham Dance Company

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“I’m fascinated by what drives people to get out of bed and to push the Sisyphean boulder up the hill again and again,” says Kenneth Parris on his New York Times sketches of dancers in the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. “Under the patina of grace and glamour, there lies a working-class ethic.”


Company members Marcie Munnerlyn, Dylan Crossman and Robert Swinston

Drawn to the raw physicality of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s dancers, Brooklyn artist Kenneth E. Parris III set out 20 months ago to document the company’s Legacy Tour. Yet despite the appeal of the performers’ athleticism, he chose not to focus on the company’s historic final performances: Instead, he’s been chronicling the dancers’ off-stage time through a series of graphite sketches – 16 and counting – for the New York Times.

Parris, who describes his own upbringing as blue collar, acknowledges respect for the grueling work – often performed through injuries – of making movement seem effortless on stage, and that’s part of what he aims to capture in his drawings.

“I’m fascinated by what drives people to get out of bed and to push the Sisyphean boulder up the hill again and again,” he said in a recent interview. “Under the patina of grace and glamour, there lies a working-class ethic. I saw this tour as an opportunity to explore and tell the dancer’s story from a different perspective.”

Parris’ self-financed project, which has taken him from Monaco to Jerusalem to London to Mexico City, this week brings him to Minneapolis, where he’ll commemorate the company’s final performance – one of many over the five-decade relationship between the Walker and the late Merce Cunningham – through an artwork. He recently took time to discuss the project and his relationship with the company.


Melissa Toogood visits the doctor in Austin

Paul Schmelzer: Do you have experience with dance, or are you learning the culture of the dance world — “the dancer’s way of life,” as the series intro in the New York Times says — as you go along?

Kenneth Parris: My parents made it their duty to expose my sisters and me to art, music, dance, and sports. Even though we’re a working-class family, art has always been viewed and celebrated as an essential part of life.

When I met a Cunningham dancer through a friend I started attending performances. Several months later, I met Melissa Toogood, who was a RUG [a member of the Repertory Understudy Group] at the time. We started dating and through living together, I was able to see how demanding it is to perform at this level. I get the impression that few administrators within dance organizations — let alone the rest of the public — understand the number of hours dancers spend outside rehearsals maintaining their physicality and working through injuries and chronic pain. Merce’s work, and the final two-year Legacy Tour in particular, is physically and emotionally challenging. Through a bit of a leap of faith, the dancers were generous enough to let me into their private lives so I could gain the insight needed to do this work.

Schmelzer: There’s something fascinating about the analog nature of drawing in this age of digital photography: It seems more expressive and also more anachronistic. What are you finding to be the medium’s strengths in telling the stories of your experiences and the final tour of the company? Are there metaphors that come to mind for what you do (the courtroom sketch artist, the official army artist, the embedded war correspondent)?

Parris: I have approached this project like a documentary. When I first proposed this to the dancers, I had ideas of what I wanted but wasn’t really sure where it would take me. Photographing and drawing them has been a little bit like capturing wildlife. They’re unpredictable; you just never know what you are going to get. But mostly, I have trusted my instincts and paid attention to what’s going on around me, and then I’ll see something interesting.

Using a digital camera has given me the immediacy I need, but drawing has given me more versatility. I am not married to the photograph when it’s a reference, and with graphite I have more freedom to manipulate the image. I am able to steer the viewer’s attention not just with the use of composition and negative and positive space but with lighting and selective development; what I choose to render in more detail and what I allow to drop off. Similar to how Alexey Brodovitch was able to control aspects of his images in the dark room for his ballet book, I can put more focus on creating an atmosphere.


Krista Nelson and Robert Swinston biking in Berlin

It’s not about rendering a perfect likeness, it’s about capturing a moment or a spirit of the moment. I can draw the whole figure but put more emphasis on a dancers lips and sunglasses or highlight how expressive someone’s hair or hand may be to tell a particular aspect of a story. Through the end of the tour, my plan is to continue to focus on drawing and next year I will start a series of paintings. I am looking forward to re-working compositions, putting a combination of drawings together, and working with paint and color.

Schmelzer: Your artist statement says you draw inspiration from movement — a perfect match for a world-renowned dance company — yet you’re not drawing dance, but instead you focus on what goes on when company members aren’t on stage. Why?

Parris: Seeing Merce’s work inspired me to question possibilities within my own. I feel like I started to see more subtlety in movement, and dancers clearly have so much more knowledge and control over how their bodies move through space. We have seen art that focuses on performance and rehearsal, like the paintings of Degas, for example.

But I’m also fascinated in what drives people to get out of bed and to push the Sisyphean boulder up the hill again and again. These dancers are driven and dedicated to their craft and what they do onstage seems so unattainable. For most of us it is just that. But under the patina of grace and glamour, there lies a working-class ethic. I saw this tour as an opportunity to explore and tell the dancer’s story from a different perspective.

Schmelzer: A reviewer from The Observer reveled in Merce’s close observation of the natural world: “He records with absolute precision the way that currents of activity flicker through a group as it responds to an atmospheric change or unsettling event; the way that patterns form and dissolve, giving the momentary impression of order, of conformity to some unknown set of determinants.” That’s not unlike the part in your artist statement that says you “explore interpersonal relationships and the effect of an individual’s action on the surrounding human landscape.” Do you feel an affinity for the late, great Merce? Have you ever met him? And how is this sentiment from your artist statement manifest in your drawings?


Brandon Collwes, Silas Riener, Jamie Scott, Emma Desjardins in Marseille

Parris: I do feel an affinity for Merce. I continue to be very affected by his work and the dancers that do it. I have met him before and even did a quick pen and ink sketch of him once when I was in St. Cloud for the performance of Ocean at the Rainbow Quarry in 2008. One dancer was injured during rehearsal, and it was amazing to watch Merce work with the others to make adjustments and cover parts. They had very little time and everyone worked together very calm and professionally.

There is a heightened level of intimacy between this group of people. At times, I have seen dancers get frustrated with one another, and I’ve also seen a knowing nod or glance exchanged or a simple touch that seems to say, “I understand, and I am here.”

In a world that seems to glorify hyper-individualism and social dysfunction, this group of people works together everyday on and off stage. It is inspiring to see people contributing to something that is bigger than themselves. I hope that my work captures some of this ethos and stimulates a personal experience for viewers.


Parris’ sketch of Merce Cunningham at the 2008 performance Ocean near St. Cloud, Minn.

The Merce Cunningham Dance Company performs Nov. 4-6 at the Walker’s McGuire Theater. Parris will be here for the performance and promises to share his sketch from the visit.

From the Archives: Merce Cunningham & The Walker, 1972-1989

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Anticipating next week’s performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on its Farewell Legacy Tour, and adding to the previous post charting Cunningham’s history at the Walker, here we cover the ’70s and ’80s. Click on any image for a larger view. Cunningham performs Canfield in 1972 in a Walker gallery. Design by Robert Morris. [...]

Anticipating next week’s performances by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on its Farewell Legacy Tour, and adding to the previous post charting Cunningham’s history at the Walker, here we cover the ’70s and ’80s. Click on any image for a larger view.

Cunningham performs Canfield in 1972 in a Walker gallery. Design by Robert Morris.

Program cover from 1972:

Cunningham and John Cage perform A Dialogue, 1974:

Event No. 127: Merce Cunningham and Co. perform at the Macalester College gym, with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra, 1975:
Merce Cunningham at the Firehouse Theater in Minneapolis, 1977:
With company members in rehearsal, 1978:

In 1981, the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra (then directed by Dennis Russell Davies) dedicated an entire year to the work of Cage and copresented a number of Cunningham residencies and performances, including the groundbreaking Perspectives series, which highlighted musical elements of the repertoire, complete with lectures, classes, and films.

 

Here’s a poster from Cunningham’s concurrent residency at the Walker:

A video interview that same year, “Chance Conversations,” took place at Saltari Studios in Minneapolis:

The Company premieres Fabrications at Northrop Auditorium, 1987:

Cunningham backstage at the Walker’s auditorium (now the Walker Cinema), 1989:

Jerome Bel on why you don’t need to know dance to see his work

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What is modern dance anyway? Through simple and honest storytelling, dancer Cédric Andrieux — former principal dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company — tells us about the life of a dancer from behind-the-scenes, connecting us to modern dance with his personal inside account. This show gives a sort of 101 of modern dance and unique [...]

What is modern dance anyway?

Dancer Cédric Andrieux

Through simple and honest storytelling, dancer Cédric Andrieux — former principal dancer with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company — tells us about the life of a dancer from behind-the-scenes, connecting us to modern dance with his personal inside account. This show gives a sort of 101 of modern dance and unique insights into Merce Cunningham‘s work and innovative dance in general. It’s a great story for people new to dance who may be curious (and perhaps even baffled) and gives new insights to those who are  familiar to Cunningham and Bel’s work.

Choreographer and brilliant showman Jérôme Bel Skypes in from Paris (very early in the morning after a red-eye) to tell us  in 1:34 what this story is all about and why anyone can understand it.

We promise you will be as charmed as we are.

In another simple, beautiful, and funny performance in Minneapolis in ’05, Bel captivated the audience with The Show Must Go On where a group of people onstage listening to music on headphones, well, get crazy. Check out this video of our favorite moment.

The performance Cédric Andrieux is Friday and Saturday 28th-29th at 8pm. Show information and tickets here.


 

From the Archives: Merce Cunningham & the Walker, 1948 – 1969

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With its historic acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection earlier this year, the Walker marked the beginning of a new era in its more-than-50 year relationship with the legendary choreographer. The collection comprises hundreds of works by a roster of leading visual artists who created sets, props, costumes, backdrops and other decor for the [...]

With its historic acquisition of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company Collection earlier this year, the Walker marked the beginning of a new era in its more-than-50 year relationship with the legendary choreographer. The collection comprises hundreds of works by a roster of leading visual artists who created sets, props, costumes, backdrops and other decor for the company.

Cunningham Fellow Abi Sebaly has been providing a sneak preview of some of the objects here on the Walker blogs (while throwing in some recipes with impressive art-historical pedigrees), and the first exhbition featuring works from the collection, Dance Works I: Merce Cunningham/Robert Rauschenberg, is set to open November 3.

Dance Works I is part of a larger showcase of events, The Next Stage: Merce Cunningham at the Walker Art Center, which fittingly includes some of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company’s final performances  on its Farewell Legacy Tour.

In leading up to that “Next Stage,” it also seems fitting to look back and chart some key moments in the decades-long association between Cunningham and the Walker. Thanks to Walker archivist Jill Vuchetich and marketing intern Ashley Monk for finding, scanning, and uploading the artifacts below, and for a couple more blog posts in the coming weeks. Click on any image for a larger view.

 

Cunningham’s relationship with the Walker started with a cold call of sorts, via US post, in 1948. An enterprising sort, Cunningham — who was then performing as a soloist with composer John Cage, before founding the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1953 — wrote to the Walker’s then-director Daniel S. Defenbacher regarding a possible tour stop in Minneapolis in the winter of 1949.

The handwritten note on the letter above ( “? nothing else in letter”) indicates that Cunningham may have forgotten to enclose his promotional brochure; in any case, one eventually arrived at the Walker ”under separate cover,” as they used to say. Click on the second image to read commentary on Cunningham’s “gifts as a lyric dancer” from the Herald-Tribune‘s esteemed dance critic (and poet and novelist), Edwin Denby:

While Cunningham’s Twin Cities debut took place at a YMCA in the late ’50s, the Walker’s first presentation of this “leading figure in the contemporary American dance” occurred on February 13, 1963. The Walker facility at that time lacked a theater, so the performance, which included John Cage and ” ‘far-out’ pianist ” David Tudor, took place nearby at The Woman’s Club:

That 1963 performance was an apparent success, as Merce & Co. returned the following year. This time they performed in the brand-new Guthrie Theater, which was to host many Walker dance and music programs. The 1964 program, as in 1963, included Antic Meet — a piece that will also be performed during the Company’s final Twin Cities performances November 4 – 6, 2011. Note Cunningham’s statement at the end of the program, which seems simple and forthright today, but was quite radical at the time.

In 1967 the Walker brought Cunningham to town to offer a series of local classes:

And in 1969, he visited (and performed) as an artist-in-residence, the first of nine such engagements. The poster for that performance featured art from Jasper Johns, who by then had replaced Robert Rauschenberg as Cunningham’s primary artistic collaborator on Company productions.

1969 Merce Cunningham Dance Company poster.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Stay tuned for posts featuring artifacts from the ’70s, ’80s, ’90s, and ’00s.

Walker Performing Arts gets props from METRO, Dark Dark Dark

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The Walker’s Performing Arts department — which programs everything from contemporary dance and theater to concerts like Rock the Garden and Summer Music & Movies — makes METRO Magazine’s 2011 METRO 100, a list of “the people, places and things that appear on this list enrich our community in a unique way.”

Why, thank you! The Walker’s Performing Arts department — which programs everything from contemporary dance and theater to concerts like Rock the Garden and Summer Music & Movies — makes METRO Magazine’s 2011 METRO 100, a list of “the people, places and things that appear on this list enrich our community in a unique way.”

Here’s the listing, which appears at number two in the magazine’s October issue:

2. Walker Art Center’s dance programming

Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, Morgan Thorson and Alan Sparhawk’s Making Music Series collaboration and Despair Be Damned, a showcase of music and dance from the Democratic Republic of Congo, are just three recent reasons we like the Walker Art Center’s dance programming—which now rivals the breadth of its already-diverse visual-arts collection. The recent (and gigantic) Merce Cunningham Dance Company visual-arts acquisition coupled with the company’s farewell performance … sees the Walker pushing the envelope even further. walkerart.org

Minnesota’s Dark Dark Dark has high praise for the Walker as well. The chamber-folk sextet, which was commissioned to create a live score for Fritz Lang’s Spies at Summer Music & Movies last summer, included the center in its list of “All-Time Top Five Favorite Museums To Visit While Touring The World” in the Dallas Observer. At number five, the group says the Walker “was on the forefront of ‘contemporary art center re-designs.’ It looks great, and has amazing performance programming. A great collection, too, as well as an exciting layout that’s fun to navigate.” Dark Dark Dark’s favorite museum: MASSMoCA.

On backstage wall, Walker performers leave a mark — in silver Sharpie

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“Many performers would sign over the course of the time they were there. Some would not want to jinx their performance and would only sign when they were on the way out,” former Crew Chief Rob Mills recalls. “Over time, performers became more bold or, in the spirit of one-upmanship, got more elaborate in their signing. I’ve seen performers spend the week figuring out just how they are going to sign.”

From Red Rocks Amphitheatre’s graffiti-covered stairway to the green room at First Avenue, rock venues have long seen their walls scrawled with the doodles and autographs of the artists who grace their stages. Ditto the Walker: In a part of the building rarely seen by visitors — just outside the McGuire Theater’s green room — a black-paneled hallway is fast filling with traces left by performers who’ve made the Walker home while on tour. But while some big names make the wall — Brian Eno, for one — what’s unique about the Walker’s signatures, says Events and Media Production manager Pearl Rea, is that they’re dominated by names of lesser-known, experimental artists. (more…)

Build. Collapse. Rebuild. – SpeakEasy for Structure and Sadness

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Following the Saturday evening performance of Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, a group of audience members convened in the McGuire theatre’s balcony bar for a SpeakEasy, an informal discussion designed to offer an opportunity to share ideas, interpretations, and questions. This weekend’s conversation was facilitated by choreographer and Walker tour guide Ray Terrill and Otto [...]

Following the Saturday evening performance of Lucy Guerin’s Structure and Sadness, a group of audience members convened in the McGuire theatre’s balcony bar for a SpeakEasy, an informal discussion designed to offer an opportunity to share ideas, interpretations, and questions. This weekend’s conversation was facilitated by choreographer and Walker tour guide Ray Terrill and Otto Ramstad of the Body Cartography Project. This blog is drawn from participants’ comments and offers an online forum for continued discussion.

Structure and Sadness begins with a non-emotional exploration of the limits of materials. A solo dancer opens the evening manipulating a flat rectangle, establishing its boundaries and testing its ability to fold, bear weight, and fall. The company expands this introductory theme, methodically constructing an architectural form that angles to an apex and fills the stage. Individuals break off in ones and twos to conduct precise choreographic investigations of engineering apparatuses and to foreshadow the disaster to come, blurring balances, suspensions, and falls.

Taking, as Otto suggested, a formalist approach to catastrophe, Guerin’s piece emphasizes the exactitude of sciences connected to built environments. In an efficient, pedestrian manner dancers perform the work of construction while vignettes suggest a larger underlying order and logic. Precise movements turn angular bodies into interacting tools and imply the systematized disciplines of engineering or architecture, herein displaying the mathematics of structures and construction through the physics of bodies. The grandness of architecture is reduced to a human scale as dancers coolly engage with their materials, assuming a stability that is never ensured.

As the program notes indicate, this attentive work is already doomed. The dancers are retelling the story of a tragic 1970 Melbourne bridge collapse. Onstage the structure tumbles, a pop song is interrupted, and as a chorus moans, one dancer reels from the sudden emotional impact, staggering helplessly across the now open space. Coping with the shock, performers pick up the pieces, regaining composure and responding with the familiar formulas introduced earlier in the performance.

We build, our efforts crumble before our eyes, and we rebuild. Is this new attempt conducted with a greater awareness, a deepened connection between bodies, and a transformed sense of our own fragility? Do we approach the rebuilding disillusioned, anticipating a future disaster and fearing the unknown flaws built into our new structure? Do we memorialize and then forget, reverting to life as it was?

Structure and Sadness is an evening divided into meticulous construction and the ensuing aftermath when this order falls apart. The specific Australian history depicted in is echoed across time and space in our recent 35W bridge collapse and the tragedy of 9-11. The trust and innocence of a time before catastrophe is seen in a new light from the other side of such events. Impacted in diverse ways, individuals collect to mourn, memorialize, and begin constructing anew. Through work, tragedy, and protest, bodies congregate. This gathering offers both the promise of what we might accomplish as well as a reminder of our frailty. Guerin’s soloists invite audience members to consider the larger system informing any singular project, to see our varied efforts in context, and to hopefully find a means to both remember and continue on.
Read blogs about Structure and Sadness by Penelope Freeh and Emily Taylor.

Lucy Guerin, Inc. “Structure and Sadness”

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Structure Establishes The darkened stage space is set with bright spots, rectangles of amber light like windows on the floor. One is vertical and longer than the others. It is a doorway or portal, hovering. A man storms his way into the space from behind what turns out to be a thin piece of something [...]

Structure Establishes

The darkened stage space is set with bright spots, rectangles of amber light like windows on the floor. One is vertical and longer than the others. It is a doorway or portal, hovering.

A man storms his way into the space from behind what turns out to be a thin piece of something like plywood, and Australian choreographer Lucy Guerin’s “Structure and Sadness” begins. With tiny holes cut out of it, the plywood is able to curve sensuously. Man and object, an organic and foreign relationship. It’s the age-old story of Man manipulating his environment to serve his needs and perhaps to conquer. Yet every once in awhile there’s an opposite image: Man hangs over object, defeated.

From the program notes we know that this dance is about the 1970 Melbourne West Gate Bridge collapse when 35 men were killed. The choreographer and the original dancers conducted extensive movement research based upon notions of support, tension, balance: things that go into bridge building. As it happens, these ideas are inherent to dancemaking too. And so the challenge becomes how to tie together a very literal idea while retaining the poetry of dance. That’s where collapse comes in, and emotion erupts from the physical.

Five more dancers enter in workaday wear and they do indeed set to work, constructing structures large and small with a-frame folders of plywood, wood blocks and poster-sized boards. (Dancers as workers. Dancing and Constructing are one and the same here. A sly wink perhaps, making the point that dance is work?) Tiny dances emerge and the seed ideas are right there: this one’s about building structures with two bodies intertwined, that one’s about all the physical possibilities with two bodies and two sticks. To literal-minded folks this piece will be deeply satisfying. One can track the movement ideas because we understand the context.

A stunning female duet ensues far stage left. Its robotic precision takes the dancers dangerously close to both one another and the delicate structure that lies at their feet.

The giant structure that now fills the space (one part of which requires a 14’ a-frame ladder to construct) topples. From the bottom up, the inevitable is set into motion in Mouse-Trap-like fashion. One block tips over and a proverbial match lights.

Watching something collapse is one of the most satisfying sights ever. Viewed with neutrality, with no emotional attachments or repercussions, structures collapsing are beautiful. Viewed within a specific historical context, they are harrowing and throat-chakra-closing. And still, they are beautiful.

Enter Sadness

A woman wearing a long black dress stands manipulating blocks at a table downstage right. She sings snippets of “Crimson and Clover” while two similarly clad women stand close together upstage on a sort of balance beam. They too vocalize, in flat mono consonants and in unison. As the song escalates and aurally turns into footage recounting the actual bridge collapse, the upstage duet persists. They bounce on the metal beam, gesturing in tandem and allowing the vocalizations to travel. Their voices are manipulated by the momentum of their movements. It is the wail of widows, the cry of mothers outliving their sons.

A requiem dance slowly begins, a sextet of three couples. Literal again with the black clad women and dead men moving with the smallest amount of physical density possible. Liquid mourning motions beget partnering manipulations and occasional spasms burst like rigor mortis.

A backdrop of lighted tubes flickers. The ladder is engaged again, this time by a crew person turning off some lights, leaving others on. The bridge is rebuilt in glowing yellow.

Dancers, the women back in danceable work clothes, retrace dance material from the first section. Structure regenerates and is now executed in exclusively dance terms. Three simultaneous duets of different choreographies now become a brilliantly organized blink of unison. Two dancers down, four up, then all down, now all up. It is a celebration of Structure and also renewal. Sadness is still here too, of course, but this is a living monument to things that span space and also time.

Structure and Sadness indeed, and I would add something like Redemption.

Lucy Guerin links collapse of 35W, Melbourne bridge in powerful dance work

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From Lucy Guerin: “My interest in making a work about the bridge is both technical and emotional. A lot of the movement was constructed using principles of contortion, compression and different tensions; as well as the human side of this story…”

Performing Arts Senior Curator Philip Bither talks about why he chose to bring the work Structure and Sadness by Lucy Guerin, which was inspired by Melbourne’s bridge collapse:

I was only a minute into my season preview talk for Walker staff members on a hot August day when our Performing Arts Coordinator, Emily Taylor, rushed in: “The 35W bridge has just collapsed…” The meeting immediately broke, everyone dispersing in all directions to watch news, call family, connect with friends. It seems like everyone in the Twin Cities remembers where they were when they heard about that surreal, wrenching moment: I immediately got on the phone with my wife who had just dropped our daughter off at the Triple Rock for an all ages show, just a few blocks from what had just turned into a smoking, twisted wreck of a bridge. The emotions remain part of us, embedded.

Two years later, when I arrived at New York’s filled-to-capacity Dance Theater Workshop to see for the first time the work of Australian Lucy Guerin, I wasn’t fully prepared for the beauty, nuance or grace of her movement exploration of another bridge collapse one that happened not four but 40 years earlier in her home city of Melbourne. In 1970, a section of the 8,500-foot span crossing the Yarra River broke loose, falling 165 feet and killing 35 people. From this starting point, Guerin began choreographing around the ideas of balance, tension and suspension — direct human parallels to the physics of a highly engineered structure like a bridge. While her piece Structure and Sadness isn’t a factual narrative, it does mine the resulting emotional devastation — or, as one critic put it, “the unknowable grief and chaos” — that rips into a community when such a trusted structure fails in an instance. I expect that resonance will be especially deep during this weekend’s Walker performances of the work.

But I think it also has universal resonance. My sister-in-law Madeleine, who lives in suburban New Jersey and rarely goes to see dance or performance work, had joined me for the DTW show in 2009. She was as moved and impressed as I was.  This was clearly an artistic experience that speaks to people beyond the dance world and beyond just those who live in cities that had experienced recent disasters.  Or as another writer, John Bailey, adroitly commented, “Catastrophe is both a social phenomenon and an individual experience, and it is in bridging these two realms, between the shared and the intensely private, that Guerin does justice to the charged territory with which the work deals.”

With Melbourne’s rebuilt Westgate Bridge soaring behind her, Guerin created a video created for the Walker about Structure and Sadness, where she links the tragedy in Melbourne with the 35W collapse.

From Guerin: “My interest in making a work about the bridge is both technical and emotional. A lot of the movement was constructed using principles of contortion, compression and different tensions; as well as the human side of this story…”

Structure and Sadness opens in the Walker’s McGuire Theater tomorrow night and runs through Saturday.

Click here for tickets, and show times.

 

Why Lucy Guerin’s Show is even better than you’d expect

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The title of Lucy Guerin’s dance work coming to the Walker this weekend may cast it in a remote and somber light: Structure and Sadness. And while the piece is about “sadness” and “structure” in certain ways, it lithely illuminates history in ways akin to the power of Ralph Lemon’s Come Home Charlie Patton or even Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

photo Jeff Busby

The title of Lucy Guerin’s dance work coming to the Walker this weekend may cast it in a remote and somber light: Structure and Sadness. And while the piece is about “sadness” and “structure” in certain ways, it lithely illuminates history in ways akin to the power of Ralph Lemon’s Come Home Charlie Patton or even Steve Reich’s Different Trains.

The background is simple: in 1970, the West Gate Bridge in Melbourne collapsed while it was being built, killing thirty-five construction workers. Clipping along to a striking soundscape, the choreography recalls the imagery of Charles C. Ebbets’ Lunchtime Atop a Skyscraper. Incidentally, many of the construction workers killed in the West Gate Bridge collapse were on lunch break under the span that fell.

At just under an hour, this is a concise work but not slight. Rather, for Minnesotans living with the residue of our own 2007 bridge collapse, its therapeutic capacity is hard to deny. And in its concerns with the structural aspects of manipulation, the physics of exertion and power on human bodies, Structure and Sadness feels timely too, a dance work for the 99% situating their resistance on an entirely different bridge.

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