THIS WEEK: Tere O'Connor Dance

As Jean-Luc Godard was to cinema at the height of the New Wave, so Tere O’Connor is to phenomenological dance in his rejection of what he calls “narrative ideologies” or “abstraction as a cliché.”

“My work is not a journey toward aboutness,” O’Connor told Gay City News. “It’s more a kind of immersion or reflection on things without singular meanings.”

O’Connor has been creating important experimental work in New York for almost 30 years, putting theory into practice in the service of allowing dance to exploit its inherent properties.

For his latest work, “Wrought Iron Fog,” the artist is subjecting language to his choreographic process. “The overall experience,” he explained, “is more important than the hieroglyphic elements. I’m allowing experience to teach me how to make that frontal in the work, instead of letting people getting lost reading sign systems. Dance has a different grammar.”

“Inside of dance,” O’Connor asserted, “philosophy and psychology and systemic elements shape the surface. Instead of designing of shapes over time, there is a process that gives birth to dance. There can be elements of the known on that surface, but they are not strung together on a narrow accumulation of time.”

Cultural bias, the artist believes, inclines audiences to approach dance in a manner he called “looking for the ghost of the choreography.” He explained, “People go in trying to read dance like a book. It is not a book. It may have pages, and words are there, but reconfigured.”

O’Connor suggested, too, that dance has more to offer than an artistic experience. “I would like the power of this form to be unleashed,” he said. “It’s the great diffuser of monothematic dogmatic ideologies. It uses complication as a way to undermine linguistic logic, and shows its otherness. It’s a journey away from language, toward letting go of the naming of things. It’s an other experience that has its own value.”

“Dance,” the choreographer-philosopher concluded, “is looking at a constellation of consciousness and daily necessity; a work derived from total experience. I want to erase episodes, to create a sensation cloud where you can fall in and engage with your own narrative.”

Flatland

Vanessa Justice’s Flatland is a world of many dimensions. Maggie Bennett, Kendra Portier, and Alli Ruszkowski weave their way through the many nooks and crannies of Flatland with one part grace, two parts pulsation, and all parts surreal. Throughout the piece, the movements appear to be very much a part of a ritual that we, the audience, are not invited to, but are simply observers.
Using black-and-white clips from the movie, Eraserhead, Justice’s women run, scream, and convulse around a shadowy room. There appeared to be no narrative, which left the piece simply to be interpreted by emotion alone. The hour-long piece produced at times terror, confusion or incredulity, or amusement. The mood was often tense, only relieved by the sudden bursts of lively music or at an instance when the three women stepped up to the audience and offered “the best seat in the house,” so that we might be “comfortable.” However, this display of including the audience only served to alienate the audience more, almost mocking it for watching the women move. Once an audience member was placed in the seat, the women promptly went back to ignoring the audience.
However surreal the show was, it was nevertheless interesting to watch as the women made their way through Flatland, a world where anything could happen—and be almost normal.


Erica Reyes

Guest Speaker Elizabeth Zimmer

Elizabeth Zimmer has been writing about the arts since 1971, beginning as a freelancer for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in Halifax, Nova Scotia. A native New Yorker, she has worked as a writer and editor for The Village Voice, the Los Angeles Herald Examiner, and dozens of other publications; she currently contributes to The Australian, Dance Magazine, and New York's free daily paper Metro. She teaches writing to aspiring critics of all ages, and has studied many forms of dance; she has performed in the work of several New York choreographers, and mounted her own show, North Wing, at Here.

Elizabeth will be coming in to speak this Friday, November 6. Please bring your written reviews with you.

City Center Bail Out, er um, Stimulus

City Center was daunting: large and stuffy and crowded with wine-sipping sycophants...but we did run into Elizabeth Zimmer in the lobby. When we got upstairs to our seats, we endured a mean usher, twice, and then after accommodating the Eurotrash, had to deal with their incessant seal-like clapping. What put it over the top for me was the presentation itself. Enough that there were there ballets in one program - that's to be expected, and we had discussed protocol about leaving at intermissions at a multi-presentational format, i.e. allowed.

But first, Christopher came out and talked about the company and the process and a film that he then showed about the company and the process. And THEN the first ballet began, and the choreography was masterful, and the dancing exquisite, but the underlying stereotypes of gender and behavior really insufferable, especially, I felt, coming from an openly gay ballet master. This is one of the essential problems of ballet, the deeply rooted conservatism. Still, it was excellent for the students to also have this experience. With one exception, the urge to vacate was palpable.

(Afterwards, I considered why our experience at NYCB last semester was so positive and concluded, that one, we had a pre-show talk with the education director, who was very hospitable, and two, the program included some contemporary work that all of the students were impressed and inspired by (Preljocaj). While we had discussed the significance of Balanchine, those works often do read as culturally out of touch, especially when they are live.)