Back in 2016 I organized a screening of dance films at Play House, an intimate performance space in Detroit run by The Hinterlands as part of Power House Productions' creative neighborhood stabilization work. The occasion was a commemoration of Leap Year and the fact that we got a whole extra night that year—why not spend it watching dance films? We called it LEAP NIGHT. (Dancing...leaping...get it?)
Talking and gesturing like someone who knows things
Somehow four year have gone by (what?) and look! It's another Leap Year. Thus it is my profound pleasure to invite you to LEAP NIGHT 2, a screening of a whole new crop of exceptional and inspiriting dance films on February 29 at, once again, Play House.
To answer a pretty common question: no, we're not going to watch Dirty Dancing. I actually haven't seen Dirty Dancing (I know, I know) and while I'm sure it's fun to watch, it's not exactly what I'm aiming for here. (Though that does remind me of a related event I'd like to host someday, a screening of dance sequences from popular films...).
By "dance films," I mean a particular species of art film called dance-for-camera: typically short, non-narrative works made by film or video artists in close collaboration with dancers and choreographers. This is a great if underappreciated genre that is all about re-imagining the experience of watching, understanding, and enjoying dance. In it, the camera does not merely record a performance, documentary-style, but becomes an integral part of the choreography.
At its core, dance-for-camera is ultimately about liberation. Not just the liberating possibilities of dance, the most immediate and vital of the arts, but the liberation of the filmmaker (from narrative conventions) and of the spectator (from the fixed, earthbound perspective of traditional live performance, and from preconceptions of what dance can be and mean). As much as these rarely-screened films are about human bodies in motion (and they are, gloriously and beguilingly, about that), they are also about experiment and creative risk-taking, about how the camera, editing, and special effects can re-order our experience of the world in ways that transcend and expand our limited powers of perception.
Dancer (2011) by Dara Friedman. Courtesy of the artist.
This year's program will include an assortment of works made between 1899 and 2018. Since I'd like there to be some surprises the night of, I'm not going to publish the whole lineup here, but I am thrilled to share that LEAP NIGHT 2 will include the opportunity to see high quality digital versions of two especially miraculous works in this genre: Dara Friedman's 2011 Dancer, a sprawling, sensuous black and white film in which Miami's urban environment is imagined (or perhaps revealed) as a place where dance happens everywhere, and Nam June Paik's 1978 Merce by Merce by Paik, a radically inventive videodance in which Paik, along with collaborators Charles Atlas, Shigeko Kubota, and legendary dancer and choreographer Merce Cunningham, joyfully explode time and space in their rigorous and restless exploration of the form. (Can video dance?)
Merce by Merce by Paik (1978) by Nam June Paik. In collaboration with Charles Atlas, Merce Cunningham, and Shigeko Kubota. Courtesy of Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.
LEAP NIGHT 2 will take place on February 29, 2020 from 7:30-9:30 at Play House, 12657 Moran St., Detroit, MI 48212. The films will be presented in a continuous 1.5 hour program. Admission is free but donations to support the space/programming are welcome. Come by!
I took a quick trip to Chicago last weekend to see some art! Though brief, it was full—a grateful getaway and a memorable aesthetic adventure.
The impetus was Tesseract, a new dance/video work created by video artist Charles Atlas and dancer-choreographers Silas Riener and Rashaun Mitchell. Tesseract was performed at Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA)—and at the Walker Center in Minneapolis the week before—as part of "Common Time," a knockout Merce Cunningham exhibition currently on view at both institutions.
From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Photo courtesy of the MCA.
Atlas enjoyed a decades-long collaborative practice with Cunningham (1919-2009), documenting many of the legendary choreographer's dances, but also creating with him a host of experimental dance-for-camera works that radically reimagined the relationship between dance and video. Riener and Mitchell, meanwhile, were both acclaimed dancers in Cunningham's company near the end of its long run. (It disbanded, per the choreographer's instructions, upon his death.) So their new collaboration is a little "Merce Cunningham: The Next Generation," as Oren Goldenberg, a Detroit video artist and one of my travel buddies, put it. (Oren, who makes terrific dance-for-camera videos himself, is the subject of my next Essay'd essay, which will be out in a couple weeks.)
I was so curious to see what these three Mercists had made together. It turned out to be interesting, stylish, and ambitious but, I thought, ultimately a bit of a mess.
Oren's Star Trek reference ended up being pretty appropriate: Tesseract, which is half 3D dance video and half live performance with live video effects, has a decidedly sci-fi flavor. There were alien landscapes, alien scenarios, alien architecture, and (in a surprising and funny moment) an alien language; there was an especially beautiful dancer in shiny silver and black that looked and moved like an automaton; and, of course, there was the self-consciously hi-tech quality of the performance itself: not only the 3D dance film of the first half (a pretty exciting experience and, I thought, a delightful use of the medium), but also the live video effects of Act 2, which found a graceful (you might say dancerly) Steadicam-equipped videographer onstage with the dancers, whose likenesses were simultaneously projected onto a scrim and digitally manipulated by Atlas in real time.
From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Photo by Ray Felix, courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
There was, in the end, much to appreciate about Tesseract, especially in the 3D film, which cut between six different scenarios with markedly different sets, choreographies, costumes, and video effects. My favorite was a sort of Martian landscape, complete with a little Ray Bradbury building on the horizon, in which a group of orange-clad dancers with little geometric growths in their costumes were green-screened into the scene, collage-like, and proceeded to manipulate and move, slowly and exploratorily, through a series of larger shapes with which they were each paired. Subtle, mysterious, seductive stuff.
From Tesseract (2017) by Charles Atlas, Rashaun Mitchell, and Silas Riener. Production photo courtesy of the Walker Art Center.
Aside from a few decidedly over-the-top moments, I found myself mostly absorbed by the video, but I had a harder time getting into the live performance. It wasn't just that the on-stage videographer was distracting (he was); it was also that the video effects felt a little hokey and arbitrary, and that they reminded me of stronger, surer works that incorporated similar effects more successfully, like Lucinda Childs's 1979 Dance, which I saw on the same MCA stage in 2009 (and which I wrote about in this very blog!), and Cunningham's own Biped (1999), which made an indelible impression when I saw it in Ann Arbor all the way back in 2004. Both of those pieces include images of moving bodies projected onto a scrim in front of the dancers, but in each, the live dancing and the film/video effect are integrated into a coherent whole.
From Dance (2009 revival) by Lucinda Childs. Photo by Sally Cohn, courtesy of L'Obs.
Tesseract emulates both of those classic works, with the key difference that now the video is live. Does it need to be? It felt showy and a little contrived—something done because it could be done, rather than something undertaken to meaningfully advance the relationship between dancer and moving image. A stimulating challenge, no doubt, for the whole team of artists, but does it justify the distracting and distancing effect on the audience? I give the creative trio credit for much about Tesseract, which, in the end, I'm glad I saw (and which was, I ought to say, a robust and tentacled work, not easily summed up) but ultimately I felt that it didn't hang together. It lacked a center, and at the same time there was so much of it. (Do I sound like a cranky minimalist?) It seemed, as Oren remarked later, experimental in a way that connotes something still being worked out—something unfinished, in process.
More coherent, even in its overabundance, was "Common Time," the Cunningham exhibition that occupied the entire fourth floor of the MCA, and which we returned to the museum the next day to experience. Its theme is the dense network of creative collaborations and relationships that typified Cunningham's practice—and that brought dance into fruitful contact with the wider art world.
66-76-89 (1990) by Nam Jun Paik
Cunningham was an inveterate collaborator, working with a dizzying array of influential (largely New York-based) artists over his long career. They created sets, costumes, music, soundscapes and, in the case of Atlas and fellow video artist Nam Jun Paik, films and videos that augment, complement, complicate, and ultimately co-create Cunningham's work. (Cunningham maintained a remarkable degree of trust in his many collaborators, who were typically encouraged to pursue their own visions independently. Often, it was only in performance that all the elements would come together.) The exhibition overflows with these materials, including sets by Frank Stella, Robert Rauschenberg, and Robert Morris; costumes by Rei Kawakubo; scores and sound art by John Cage and Pauline Oliveros; and more Cunningham videos than I had ever hoped to see in one place. In addition, there are a number of standalone works by many of these artists, as well as ephemera from others with whom Cunningham did not actively collaborate, but who labored around the same time and place in their own influential and boundary-breaking ways, like Trisha Brown and Yoko Ono.
Autobiography (1968) by Robert Rauschenberg
"Common Time" is lavish, overwhelming, transcendent. It is at once a sprawling survey of some of the most groundbreaking American artists of the latter half of the 20th century, and a tightly focused examination of some of the circumstances and concerns that united them. (It's nuts to think that this is just half of a show, the other half filling the galleries of the Walker in Minneapolis.)
Most exciting, to me, was MC9, an unforgettable, immersive installation by Charles Atlas that reinforced my admiration for his work (any ambivalent impressions of Tesseract notwithstanding). Picture it: you enter a long, dark room, one of the MCA's impressive barrel vault galleries, and find yourself surrounded by an architecture of screens: monitors of varying sizes, many quite large, most sleek and flat, a few boxy; some mounted above your head, and others installed at body level. There is an incredible visual and aural commotion as nine channels featuring looping excerpts from 21 different Atlas/Cunningham dance-for-camera collaborations made over 40 years are simultaneously played (so that multiple screens display the same works at the same time, while different screens display others). Videos do not play back-to-back; edited between them are either a countdown, such as you'd see on an old film header (complete with penetrating, metronomic tones marking the descent), or else (literally) luminous, saturated color fields, a huge pink rectangle here, a green one there, that briefly catch and fill the eye, offering a respite from the relentless movement in the videos, and casting colored reflections on the bodies of the other spectators, who stand and take it all in or perambulate through the ad hoc promenade—agog, indifferent, or somewhere in between.
Installation view of MC9 (2012) by Charles Atlas
I got lost in that room, and might have stayed for hours. There was so much happening, so much to take in. It was a dreamy, mysterious space, both cavernous and intimate. There was an overlapping of sound—warm, ambient, and suddenly clear—and everywhere you looked, there were bodies in motion (in that crisp, awkward, balletic Cunningham style), bodies both historic and near-contemporary, in black and white and vivid color, life-size bodies that were imaginatively de- and re-contextualized, tracked up close by fluid, moving cameras, and depicted in images nested within images. A techno-temple to a titan, made of time. I took a brief video inside with my phone. It's just a phone video, nothing special (actually it's pretty bad), and it offers the barest glimpse of the thing itself, but I'm compelled to share it anyway:
I left "Common Time" and Chicago with a feeling of gratitude for having seen so much work by Cunningham and his cohort, and also with a sense of the weight and fullness of his long life. Cunningham died at 90, and had been working, collaborating, and documenting his efforts for nearly 60 of those years. I am inspired by this life: by the extent of his accomplishments, by his evidently vast capacity for friendship, and by his openness to time and chance and to moving forward with the world.
On the subject of time and aging, I should wrap up by mentioning that the MCA has another terrific exhibition up right now, "Eternal Youth," that would itself have been worth the trip from Detroit. It's a group show concerned with youth culture since the 1990s. I'm not going to go into it at length here, but suffice it to say that it's a sexy, funny, challenging, and queer-forward show, full of inventive, absorbing work by a diverse roster of artists both well-known and emerging. As such, it's a nice counterweight to the somewhat High Art seriousness of "Common Time," which might even seem a little stuffy, a little camp, by comparison.
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Coda: While at the MCA, I was delighted to run into my friends Lesley and Megan from Detroit, who took me around "Eternal Youth" and showed me some of their favorite pieces. Here they are watching one of my favorites, a 20 minute video by Jumana Manna called Blessed Blessed Oblivion (2010), an earthy, engrossing exploration of the macho mystique of East Jerusalem thug culture. (You can watch it on Vimeo here.)
Back in June, I posted a photograph I took inside an installation at the Detroit Institute of Arts. The installation, a multimedia immersion in the 1968 Merce Cunningham dance RainForest, was part of Dance! American Art 1830-1960, a fine exhibition organized by the DIA that included mostly representations of dance in visual art, but also a handful of notable works related to dance as an art form itself.
RainForest, like many Cunningham dances, is notable in part for its incorporation of work by other prominent New York artists. The costumes, two examples of which were included in the exhibition, are by Jasper Johns, and its famous decor — silver, helium-filled Mylar pillows — were designed by Andy Warhol.
Recreations of those pillows were central to the installation, which was essentially a room, defined by a curtain, two walls, and a scrim. The pillows floated along the ceiling and billowed about the room, while a 1968 film of the dance was projected onto the scrim, but also through it, onto a solid wall, creating a mirror image.
The viewer could either consider the work from outside the room, looking at and through the scrim, or from inside, a gently chaotic, multilayered environment in which the predominant sense was of existing inside some version of the dance itself.
From either perspective, one was conscious of other people viewing/inhabiting the work, so a kind of voyeurism (watching people watching dance) became central to the experience of the installation. (The scrim, the gauzy mediator, at once allowed for this voyeurism and softened the tension that might otherwise arise from the experience of observing/being observed.)
I'm grateful to the DIA for organizing the installation, which provided the opportunity to experience RainForest in a way that was both vital and archival. It was an inventive installation and, I thought, well suited to Cunningham's work, in that it provided an essentially decentralized viewing experience. (Throughout his career, Cunningham resisted choreographing in ways that were uniform, at both the level of his dancers' individual bodies and in the relations between and among dancers, but also from the point of view of the audience, which, he recognized, were always in fact points of view, plural.)
This was not, after all, a reliable record of a dance, but something new and more complex that shifted between past and present: something that enveloped, even overwhelmed the spectator, whose eye zigzagged from the pillows above to the recorded dancers' spectral, larger-than-life bodies in motion, to the bodies of the people on the other side of the divide: walking, standing, sitting, watching.
This textural layering advanced an engaging and noteworthy approach to the presentation of historic dance works in a museum setting, outside of live performance, carrying RainForest forward in a sensitive and respectful way. It also made for a naturally inviting opportunity to take pictures, so after seeing the exhibition once, I returned, during lunch on a weekday, to shoot. For this opportunity, too, I thank the DIA, which encouraged museum-goers to take and share photos of the Dance exhibition — an unusual invitation, as far as special exhibitions at major American art museums go, and a nice example of the DIA's ongoing commitment to accessibility.
It's unusual for me to be in the museum on a weekday afternoon. I was surprised by how many people were there, and struck by how many of those people were seniors. It was an unexpectedly poignant experience, watching elderly people, many of whom moved slowly around the museum with the help of wheelchairs and walkers, absorbed, for a time, in the breathless, exhilarating movement of the dancers. Another layer: unpredictable and unintended, but resonant, nonetheless.
Last week I hosted LEAP NIGHT, a screening of seven short dance-for-camera films at Play House in Detroit. Play House, developed by Power House Productions, is the home of experimental performance group The Hinterlands, who invited me to curate a selection of historic dance films. (Well, six are historic, and one is a more recent, local production.)
It was so great. Great turn out (about 30 people showed up, just enough to fill the room), great energy, great opportunity. My pal Sarah Rose Sharp published a really nice write-up about it in KnightArts.
As I was preparing the program, I couldn't shake the feeling that I ought to write something about what I was showing, hence the following notes, comprised of a brief paragraph about each film, as well as a collage by the one and only Michel Francois Soucisse!
(click images to enlarge)
(If you haven't seen any of the films, they're all available to watch for free somewhere online, whether Youtube, Vimeo, or Ubuweb.)
