Performing Arts

From Off-Leash Area co-directors and fellow 2007 Momentum participants, Paul Herwig and Jennifer Ilse, upon viewing opening night of Momentum Weekend ONE-Jones/Bergeron:

JUSTIN JONES
Justin hit us with a kick-ass start, apologies to J Bartlett who was whisked off stage by the energy of the dancers, hyper-kinetic gestural figures wailing arms and feet…..then a substantial amount of drifting in space, pairs, singles, figures in wobbly motion across the grid of space-gravity…and in the end a dynamite portrayal of String Theory’s multidimensionality, with a tall solo dancer in a center spot, his smaller doppelganger downleft who’s shadow looms large above him, whose tripleganger is barely visible behind the Southern’s great archway……I spent a lot of time reading about String Theory when the specials hit PBS a couple of years back, bought a book, and was able to read a page each night over several months - rapt, imaginative, I didn’t know what the hell was going on after page 50! Bring on the chaos and beautiful assimilation of the small and the large - one couldn’t go far enough with a subject like this!

MAGGIE BERGERON & COMPANY
Another powerful start, this time with the simplicity of miniature homes - farmhouse, log cabin, etc. - each with a dancer inside, and then limbs and bodies begin emerging, bursting through plastic and reaching through doorways and breaking through rooftops. This use of the set is a wonderful strength in the show, as each time the dancers re-enter, deconstruct and rebuild the homes, the metaphors are always clear and artfully done. There are other strong moments in the space that is danced in outside of the homes, and they are those joyful moments in dance when the movement just seems to happen, the technical ambitions of creating it are transcended by this thing we call art.

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”>