To launch an exhibition of her drawings at the Walker, Trisha Brown performed on paper Thursday night — drawing in the Medtronic Gallery with cameras rolling and an audience packing the Walker Cinema to watch her process as it happened.
Trisha Brown has spent much of this week at the Walker Art Center working with local dancers on the nuances of her choreography and preparing to perform a drawing tonight to launch an exhibition of her works on paper, So That the Audience Does Not Know Whether I Have Stopped Dancing. On Wednesday, in the Walker’s Medtronic Gallery, Brown coached a handful of Twin Cities dancers — Emily Johnson, Sally Rousse, Morgan Thorson and Galen Treuer among them — to work out the curves of Brown’s 1968 piece Planes. Brown’s own company performs April 25 at Northrop Auditorium.
The New York Times reports that, starting next month, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company will show Mondays With Merce, an online video program featuring weekly episodes of the choreographer’s Monday class, on its Web site. As theTimes reports:
The program has three major components. First, there will be 26 episodes online beginning in September. Each will include 30 to 40 minutes of technique class, edited and supplemented with interviews with Mr. Cunningham, collaborators like the artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg and some of the original dancers from the pieces, and archival material. The episodes will show the inspiration for dances and reveal the threads that link one work to another.
"If the company is performing 'Ocean,' which is based on the circle," said Nancy Dalva, a dance historian who will be directing these edited episodes, "we can go get archival footage of 'Beach Birds,' which has the same circle in it, and show the same Matisse poster, which Merce saw in his dentist's office before he made the dance."
Cunningham and his entire troupe are performing Ocean Sept. 11-13 inside a granite quarry just outside of St. Cloud, Minn.
Miguel Gutierrez calls his company of dancers the Powerful People, and powerful they feel in Everyone, the dance-kissed piece of abstract theater opening Out There 20. At turns, the characters are also giddy people, awkward people, fascinated people, unsettled people, unbridled people, distracted people, determined people, naïve people, idealistic people, vulnerable people, frustrated people, impressionable people, lustful people and, through it all, hopeful people. Such is life as an American twentysomething, an age Gutierrez explores with layers of minimalist music and movement, fragmented text and crescendos of intensity.
At the
He also challenges his audiences. With Everyone, Gutierrez fosters a relationship that, at times, seems more zoo/visitor than performer/viewer. His players are learning how to exist in the world - we see fear, playfulness, over-the-top sexuality, and the aping of one another in the compulsion to feel normal - and they're as aware of our presence as we are of them. Moments after what could be the most extended group makeout scene in the history of theater, the players break into an atonal, Lennon-esque chorus - "When you rise up, you must sing songs" - extending their longing for community to all of us. In the end, Everyone is for anyone who wants to share or reclaim his own coming of age.
Before stepping into the great unknown of the Walker’s Out There 20, you might want to get a leg up by scanning these reviews of the artists we’re bringing here over the next four weekends:
Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People, Everyone (Wednesday-Saturday, January 9-12):
The New York Times (March 2007)
The Brooklyn Rail (April 2007)
The Village Voice (March 2007)
The TEAM, Particularly in the Heartland (Thursday-Saturday, January 17-19)
Time Out New York (March 2007)
The Edinburgh (U.K.) Scotsman (August 2006)
The New York Sun (July 2006)
Claude Wampler, PERFORMANCE (career ender) (Thursday-Saturday, January 24-26)
The Brooklyn Rail (January 2007)
The New York Times (November 2006) - part of a longer trend piece by John Rockwell. Scroll toward the end to read about Wampler.
BLURB: The New Yorker (November 2006)
David Neumann/advanced beginner group, Feed Forward (Thursday-Saturday, January 31-February 2)
The New York Times (October 2007)
Off Off Off Dance (November 2007)
Counter Critic (October 2007)
One local theater critic, running down 2007 in Twin Cities theater for MPR last week, made a request of local producers for 2008: Take more risks.
Note to critic: The Walker heeds that call every January.
The Out There series is an annual bedrock of the
The 20th Out There features four artists new to the series, bowing to the series' roots of faith in the unknown. The
"This series has tried to track the most interesting discoveries we can make in contemporary performance," says Philip Bither, the Walker's William and Nadine McGuire Senior Curator of Performing Arts. "Unless there are American institutions willing to take chances on these artists, we really risk losing this great creative part of our culture."
Cynthia Hopkins, a
"Without the support of institutions like the
"More important than that is the moral support - it's psychologically uplifting," she says. "Part of the benefit of an institution like the
Out There premiered as a collaboration between the Walker and Southern Theater, with avant garde performance artists Rachel Rosenthal and David Cale highlighting a two-weekend festival that closed with cabaret-styled evenings with a carousel of Twin Cities performers. Two years later, Out There had expanded to four weekends and become a beacon for some of
"I realized there wasn't much programming in January, and I thought that's probably when people most need to go out," recalls John Killacky, Bither's predecessor at the
Mary Ellen Childs had only recently formed her first percussion ensemble when she took part with other local artists in the first Out There. Even then, she recalls, artists shared the sense of taking part in something special. Childs and her ensemble, Crash, produced a larger piece for the 1999 Out There, and Childs recently produced a 20-year retrospective at the Southern Theater.
"I loved to be seen as 'out there,' because that's one of the things I love to toy with, whatever the edges are for me," she says. "I present my work in a lot of difference places, but I love being able to claim I was presented at the
"Twenty years ago, we were so young and we thought everything we did was great, but things have changed and even our notion of what is new has changed," Sommers says. "What's great about Philip is he's bringing in things you wouldn't normally see, things that really are on the edge, and I think the artistic community is really grateful for that."
Today, Bither says, Out There is "a survey of the most interesting work we can find," wherever it resides. Under his direction, the series has trained its lens on
Out There has cultivated an audience open to the unpredictable and undefinable, Bither says, and success isn't measured at the box office or in the next day's newspaper. Many artists invited into this series "are working ahead of their time," he says, and it may take years for their influence to show up in the arts at large.
"We take great care to provide an informed, supportive audience, and many Out There shows sell out. But audience response and even most critical response is not the primary indication, to me, of artistic value," he says. "We believe that certain ideas and innovations in art need to be supported, and this series allows us to introduce an artist to an audience and also to us, as curators. I hope Out There always stays a place we can take these chances."
Miguel Gutierrez and the Powerful People
Everyone
8 pm Thursday, January 10 (post-show Q&A)
7 and 9:30 pm Friday-Saturday, January 11-12
$20 ($14 Wednesday; $16 Thursday-Saturday Walker members)
I fought the urge to walk out of my first encounter with Jérôme Bel. It was The Show Must Go On at the Pantages (through the Walker), in 2001, a show featuring a wide line of everyday/ordinary people facing and returning the blank stares of the audience and intermittently breaking into dull interpretations of club dancing. I don’t remember much else about the night, beyond thinking I’d probably never seen a show more insulting to its audience.
I likely would have relegated the evening to a dark and distant brain cell if not for Wednesday’s opening of Pichet Klunchun and Myself, the tell-and-show Bel has crafted with the Thai dancer named in the title. Bel and Klunchun sit in chairs facing one another from opposite sides of the stage. Bel interviews Klunchun about his art and Klunchun answers — sometimes cryptically, sometimes revealingly, sometimes demonstratively — before the two reverse roles. I didn’t make the connection with the evening of six years ago until Bel played David Bowie’s “Let’s Dance” to illustrate his artistic motives. The 20-watt bulb flickered over my head — Ooooh, it’s THAT guy.
Bel and Klunchun are different breeds of minimalists, and their show is all about exposing the audience to their divergent artistic processes, from conception to construction to production. There’s a formal informality to their conversation — the most basic of questions lead to complicated blueprints, all delivered with an understated, patient pace that meshes well with the artists’ metabolisms.
Klunchun moves with the relaxed control of a cat, his movements so deliberate, subtle and precise that, in one work, he distinguishes one character from another by changing the relationship of his chin to his extended fingers. The audience gasped when Klunchun pulled his fingers back to make contact with the top of his forearm and again with his revelation that a complete performance, uninterrupted, would last one week.
My favorite moment of the evening came when Klunchun moved from a back corner of the stage toward the center, time seeming to stop not only between strides but during his strides. The room fell so silent that I could only hear a lone person breathing. I thought perhaps someone nearby had fallen asleep until I realized the breaths were coming from Klunchun, amplified through his body microphone.
By contrast, nothing about Bel is exacting. He took the stage Wednesday as if he’d just woken up, and even Klunchun, in his loosely scripted side of the conversation, seemed taken aback by Bel’s approach. I know this was a performance — how much truth Bel laced into his comments, I’m not sure — but Bel articulated a flippant if comical disregard for his audience. The rules of contemporary art, he said, allow him the freedom to do anything he wishes, audience be damned — and don’t bother asking for a refund. If that means lip-syncing through a song or doing nothing at all but standing there, returning the audience’s stare, well, he inferred, that’s art.
I now have context for what I’d too easily disregarded six years ago. Bel is all about effect — he wants to remove any sense of art (or, more specifically, artists) as rare, privileged or gifted. Rather, he tells Klunchun (and, by extension, his audience), he wants people watching his work to feel that “anyone can do this.” Mission accomplished. But there’s a uniqueness to how Bel delivers this message. When he plays the song “Killing Me Softly,” rather than dance, he takes the run of the song to illustrate his own death. Even Klunchun, in his scripted revelation, sees the artistry.
Pichet Klunchun and Myself is illuminating, captivating, funny and, particularly for Bel, brave. Positioning himself alongside a dancer of Klunchun’s caliber could only further cast Bel as an artistic layabout. But I came away awestruck with one artist and forgiving of the other, questioning my own boundaries of what is and isn’t art.
I went to the Cedar Cultural Center Monday to shoot video of a rehearsal for Festival of Lies, from Congolese choreographer Faustin Linyekula and his ensemble, Les Studios Kabako. Instead of rehearsing, Linyekula talked to several local guest artists, performing in his work Saturday, about the history and process leading to this piece. Performances are November 1-3 at the Cedar.
And here’s a piece of video of the company in performance.
Here is the first in a new Walker video series — the working title is “Process This” — dropping into the creative process of artists working with the Walker. This installment focuses on ARENA Dances, captured in rehearsal for Ugly, a Walker dance commission premiering Oct. 18-20 in the McGuire Theater.
The video runs a little under 7 minutes, so give it a little time to load before playing:
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