THE FIRST EVER: MEGA DOUCHE

It’s pretty rare these days that one critic will call out another critic for his/her work. Well, okay, except for here at Counter Critic. So how awesomely surprised were we when we found out that hacky old retard with an Arts Journal blog, John Perreault, sent a flaming bag of shit Timesward, aimed at none other than C.C. BFF and genius critic, Claudia La Rocco, for her piece–which we found hot and delicious–on what we have now dubbed the Yvonne Rainer drainer, RoS Indexical?

Perrault calls L. Ro. “untalented” and “poisonous” while blaming her for why “dance lost its edge” in the art world. He goes further to mislabel her as “conservative.” If Perreault read dance reviews at all, he would know that La Rocco’s schtick is a taste for the cutting edge plied to a relentless expectation of artistic rigor. I’m pretty sure her arguments against Rainer were that the piece was neither rigrous, nor at the cutting edge, and that, in fact, the whole RoS affair has its conceptual head firmly lodged up the ass of the 1960s: We’re paraphrasing, of course.

At any rate, there’s only one hope for douchey gossipmongers who can’t let go of a decade that often couldn’t see beyond its own infantile taste for self-satisfaction–let’s all say it together: GET OVER THE 60s!

Life just got a little sweeter. Times dance critic, Claudia La Rocco (aka L. Ro.) has been making guest spots on radio WNYC, talking about all kinds of whatnot while bringing her crazy awesome genius to listeners everywhere. Well, at least in the greater New York City area. That’s still a lot.

At any rate, check out her most recent interview, where Amy Eddings asks L. Ro.to explain, like…Is art too pretentious or are people just stupid?

C.C. would like to give a shout out to two artists who recently bore the brunt of our authoritative battery. It definitely requires balls of steel to take a hit from the Counter Critic and still be able to walk it off and come back to leave a comment. And for that level of endurance, we’re handing out a new award: The Punching Bag.

First, Imani Uzuri sent us a kind-hearted email after we called her performance at the Performa Liebestodt “overwrought and hyper emotive.”

Then, Bill Shimell challenged our ten-dollar wager that he didn’t hit many of his notes during the opening night of The Met’s Iphigenie en Tauride.

Keep rockin’ you two. We’ll see you next time…in the ring.

So, just to tighten up some loose ends…

Here’s Deborah Jowitt’s review of the Rainer drainer. She obviously has some pretty strong loyalties to the era (and I’m sure, to some of the artists). There’s only one real criticism, but in the same breath, it sounds like she tries to take a stab at…our protest to 60’s (or 60s) nostalgia!:

Non-Rite allusions (to Groucho Marx, among others) may account for some of RoS’s more confusing and structurally wobbly moments. The work refers back to the ’60s playfulness that many once considered shocking; ironically, those whose tastes were formed in the 1990s may still be discomfited by it.

Ouch! Deb, that totally hurt!

Then, lo and behold, former Times dance critic, JOHN ROCKWELL, chimes in on the whole Rite of Spring weekend on WNYC! Whatever! Where has that bastard been anyway? Probably hanging out in dark-wooded, smoke-filled rooms with all his Arts Journal buddies gossiping about the latest Lohan incident.

Anyway…

Turns out Rockwell liked Xavier LeRoy’s dance-like-no-one’s-watching wank fest. And, although he flubs the name of the Performa 07 Festival (calling it “Performers ‘07 Festival”!), he doesn’t let Rainer as easily off the hook:

It just didn’t work.

Yawoza! At least dance critics aren’t afraid to call a piece of shit out. Now, if we can only get the opera critics to step up to the open mike…

(Here’s our total Rite of Spring coverage.)

L. Ro signs out on Performa 07 with a pit stop at Micky D’s and some more stern words for RoS

Then she leaves Complexions dry eyed but with another sports metaphor under her belt

Alastair Macaulay (where the F has that bitch been?) brings his awkward handling of racial identity to Stravinsky and Balanchine’s “Agon” (Maybe we’ll do a special focus on this piece later…)

And Jennifer Dunning kicks off the holidays with a little nut cracking

(Photo by Paul Kolnik)

RITE OF SPRING MONDAY! (Oh boy…)

The second round of the rock-em-sock-em performance art biennial known as Performa, ended Monday night in a self-immolating “Grand Finale” at the Hudson Theater in Times Square. The festival, which has made us all laugh, cry, pull out our hair, stress out way too much about our fashion sensibility, and run around the city like freshly decapitated chickens (turkeys, if they do the same thing) trying to cram in as much Art World-sanctioned performance as their not-so-easily-navigable website could promote, went out rather self-consciously behind a plush red curtain.

I can’t exactly figure out what kind of the statement Performa is trying to make. RoseLee Goldberg herself came out and acknowledged that this was some kind of Performa On Broadway affair (Yvonne Rainer’s deflated RoS Indexical had premiered at the theater on Sunday and Monday). But why? And to what purpose? It seems to be reinforcing older ideas of the distinction between uptown and downtown, hard lines that have long softened since the 60s, even since 2000. Uptown and downtowncriss -cross all the time now. Classical musicians perform in little bars in Brooklyn. Brooklyn based choreographers are making dance for theJuilliard School. The old guard are now uptown staples (Wegman’s photos for The Met, Mark Morris’s Mozart Dances at Lincoln Center, Twyla Tharp’s innumerable Broadway hits).

So what fuss is the Art World trying to make? It’s not like art galleries aren’tswarming with rich people, who have taken over nearly every piece of property (even some projects) from 125 Street (on either side) to Battery Park. That includes all of downtown (Tribeca, both Villages, Meat Packing, LES, China Town) and the Brooklyn annexes of DUMBO, Williamsburg, Fort Greene, Park Slope. The presence of colonies of galleries in Chelsea have no doubt contributed to the flushing out of that area, including the slow bleed down to Gansevoort Street, where flourished, as recenlty as 2000, the unforgettable gay bar Mother, and the seediest yet most reliable and inexpensive place in NYC to find yourself in a naked orgy of men, Mr. Jay’s Hangout: all gone.[1] Seven years later, the dirty laundry has been washed, cash has won, and it would seem that the underground that the Art World now laments the loss of, has been displacedby the Art World itself, at least in terms of its bent on overinflated values and appealing to the affluent mindset.

You can’t have it both ways, RoseLee.

Still, the performances presented at the “Grande Finale” were pretty good, although predictably hard-edged and/or emo-cheesey in certain places.

Dynasty Handbag, a devilish cross between Amy Sedaris’ “Jerri Blank” from Strangers with Candy and Mo Collins’ “Lorraine” from Mad TV, opened the evening with a hilarious tribute to Performa self-consciousness. Her shtick, which is to perform with a voiceover back-up to allow slapstick-ish bad lip syncing (way before Britney decided to join in) and inner voices that disclose various existential insecurities, worked particularly well when two or three inner monologues competed stream-of-consciously to come up with a drawing that would appeal to the Art World audience. It was hilarious, climaxing, of course, with this idea: “A piece of shit on top of a birthday cake.” Perfect.

Cynthia Hopkins, who had delivered a rather compelling performance back in 2005 at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Accidental Nostalgia, a multi-media performance that included several original country sets with her band, Gloria Deluxe, came out with an acordian and delivered oddly syruppy anti-war songs that neither convinced you the war was bad or that she was good.

Brooklyn based ultra-indie band, Stars Like Flea, played a long, if anarchicly beautiful set. The lead singer can go; he adds little more than self-involved non-performing and solipsistic-auteurism. The rest of the band, a clusterfuck of piano, strings, guitars, harp, drummer, brass–a real orchestra–is virtuosic and creates big textures that usually culminate in aleatoric climaxes on major chords. It’s dada turned emo, not at all bad, if a little aimless.

HK119, the alter-ego of Finnish artist Heidi Kilpelainen, is equal parts Grace Jones and Klaus Nomi. Her metal-edged electro-pop sound is hot, as is her sinuously elastic body that was wrapped tightly in black vinyl from neck to toe. Her equally hot-bodied back up dancers had sharp, dry, geometric choreography, and manipulated simple card board cutouts of circles and triangles into a seemingly endless variety of patterns. But the seemingly endless set drew a few heckles from the audience. “It’s gong time! Bring out the gong!” snapped someone behind me. But she was hot, and it was hot, so, whatever.

Ubiquitous downtown music hero, Nick Hallett, delivered a sober set of three songs from Meredith Monk’s 1972 song cycle, Our Lady of Late. I love avant-classical, because even at its most edgy, it is softer than other forms. Accompanied only by the proto-electronic ocillation of a crystal wine glass, Hallett sang in microtonally plaintive strands, or jabbered out made-up language, or delivered medieval melodies with simplicity and clarity against the circular pitch from the glass.

Imani Uzuri, accompanied by guitarist Marvin Sewell, sang a couple overwrought, hyper emotive songs. Her big alto voice is hot, and she really chews the words, but there was something a little naive about it. I can barely imagine RoseLee chillin’ at home in her living room, curled up on a rainy day with a blanket and a cup of fennel twig tea, really feeling the Uzuri. But who knows.

The whole night ended rather poopishly with a nonsensically forced dance party at the front of the stage. It was eerily reminiscent of the fake riot Yvonne Rainer staged in RoS. This was supposedly a performance by Asia Today. I didn’t get it, nor did I like it. It seemed to lazily punctuate a festival that had, at least in some ways, initiated some interesting debate and caused us all to take a closer look at the relationship between performance and art.

But the biggest problem separating the two worlds is money. There isn’t equal opportunity here. After all the hooplah dies down, the downtown performers will go back to playing gigs for fifty bucks and a drink ticket, while even the most mediocre visual artist can sell a “limited edition print” for several thousands of dollars.

Performa’s moves have made them look a little out of touch: with the sizable group of performance artists who are promoting interdisciplinary collaboration, artistic ingenuity, and economic sustainability; with the fist-to-mouth grit of young, innovative performance artists; and most gravely, with the inverted dynamics of the economic and capital realities of twenty-first century New York City.

I only say this because of the evangelical attitude that has seeped from the cracks of this otherwise awesome event. Let’s hope in two years’ time Performa will feel less like a sermon, and more like a true exploration of contemporary (performance) art.

RITE OF SPRING MONDAY! (continued…still…)

So, C.C. was doing a little research on Yvonne Rainer and this whole RoS Perplexical, and we came upon this article in Artforum. In it, Rainer herself writes about the process of working on the piece. It’s there that Kourlas got the Robin-Williams-is-a-kinetic-genius info. It’s also there where Rainer exposes her dirty history as a hater of music.

What’s fascinating, here, is the glimpse into the self-affirming lore an artist can create around their work. She seems to be making the argument that RoS indexes history more than it strikes out on any new path. Well, duh! Rainer writes, “It’s about having a public conversation with your antecedents, foregrounding that fact rather than submerging it as if everything you do comes out of your own unique imagination. That’s never the case with me. One can’t escape history…”

Well. One can neither escape–nor ignore–the present.

RITE OF SPRING MONDAY! (continued…)

So this review just came out today, but you know, it’s all about Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical. And L. Ro. is not happy with Ms. Rainer or the staged riot she planted in half the audience:

It was the lowlight of a thoroughly dispiriting evening, akin to watching a revered athlete come out of retirement, only to operate a step behind the youngsters who grew up revering her.

Ouch.

We totally agree. At least when Kate Bush came out of musical hiding, she busted out Ariel and kicked ass all over everyone. Shiiit.

RITE OF SPRING MONDAY!

(Photo of Xavier Le Roy by Vincent Cavaroc)

It’s always fun to look back at the in-print previews of performances once the glorious spectacles have found their ways on and off the stage. We rarely look back after the engagement has run its natural life course, from anticipated, to happening, to adjudicated, to forgotten.

Gia Kourlas, two-fisting it at The New York Times and Time Out New York, previewed both Rite of Spring Performa engagements.

Back in October, Kourlas previewed RoS Indexical for the Grey Lady. It’s funny, cuz in the program from last night, I noticed a dedication to the comedian Robin Williams, and I thought, WTF is this about? I moved on, but in re-reading the preview, there it is again: The second half of the work is inspired by performances by Sarah Bernhardt and by Robin Williams, whom Ms. Rainer called “a kinetic genius.”

Whatever you want to say about Mr. Williams, I didn’t see any indexical connection to his work, except for maybe, the costumes, which, now that I think about it, did kind of look like Mork and The Lost Boys got together to open their own fashion line.

In a more recent preview for Time Out, Kourlas focuses more on Xavier Le Roy’s mime-tastic solo rendition of Le Sac. Le Roy actually preempts a criticism I made regarding the spurious conceit of conducting to the music: “It’s very interesting that when I get feedback, very often people say, ‘Oh, I always dreamed to do this!’ or ‘I was doing this as a kid in front of my stereo,’ ” he says, laughing, in a phone interview from Brazil. “And me? I never had this dream…”

Ah, I get it: What’s the difference between a child’s painting and a painting done by an artist who choses to paint like a child?

Answer: You expect one of them to know better.

Check out our double-bill review of both shows!

RITE OF SPRING MONDAY!

Dance Review: Xavier Le Roy’s The Rite of Spring & Yvonne Rainer’s RoS Indexical

The Rite of Spring is arguably the most influential piece of classical music of the twentieth century. It also happens to be a ballet. That makes it somewhat of a shock that I have never seen a completely successful dance setting of this landmark score of early modernist musical thought. Unfortunately, this remains the case, even after I had the chance to catch two Performa 07 presentations over the weekend, both of which addressed dealing with the canonic work in terms of media, yet with diverging and equally disappointing tactics.

This Is Not a Conductor

The stronger of the two works, Xavier Le Roy’s The Rite of Spring, presented at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, is heavy on the concept and light on the execution. You get it after the first thirty seconds: Mr. Le Roy, in sneakers, tight blue jeans and a red top, his back to the audience, initiates a series of motions that make it looks as if might be conducting the music. The only variations are: 1.) After about a minute, Mr. Le Roy turns to face the audience, and 2.) Mr. Le Roy mysteriously stops the gesticulating at one point and walks stage right, stopping there to look pensive, then, for reasons just as inexplicable, he walks back center and begins mime conducting again.

The sound design, by Peter Bohm, is the most interesting and professionally executed element of this piece, but even that had its flaw. The music, taken from a filmed recording made by Sir Simon Rattle with the Berlin Philharmonic, is piped in strategically through a matrix of speakers that exists beneath each seat of the theater. The effect is overwhelming, in that you feel as if you are sitting in the middle of the orchestra (so why did Mr. Le Roy start conducting with his back to us?). This approach successfully deconstructs the score in a very refreshing way. You hear some instruments closer than others. The brass suddenly sound further away, the woodwinds to your left, the bass drum right under your butt. It fractures the texture of the orchestration by creating relational imbalance. The quality of the audio is intense, but the sound suffers from being under the seats. Many of the piercing sounds (the soprano clarinet, piccolo and certain trumpet parts) written into the score maintained a muffled quality throughout. But the bass pitches were cranking. It sounded as if my downstairs neighbors had a sudden epiphany and realized that Stravinsky was hotter to jam to than the latest Alicia Keys hit (which has been on a steady loop for two months now).

Still, Mr. Le Roy’s “dancing” was one note. He mimed conducting, but loosely, so sometimes it looked as if he were just moving excitedly to the score. In terms of conducting, there is simply no technique; there is certainly no delay between his beats and the entrances of the orchestra, of which, I have to say, Mr. Le Roy had a mostly impressive command. But frankly, it just looked like Mr. Le Roy had a moment of inspiration, ran to his studio, turned the lights off, and just went for it. The problem is he went for it in front of an audience. For the record, I get that this is supposed to create some friction between expectations of sound and movement, it is a concept we’re familiar with, but I have this lingering suspicion that the piece might be better executed by some other performer; someone less goofy, more sensual, and maybe even more physically virtuosic.

Perplexical Indexical

Which brings us nicely to last night’s Performa 07 premiere of Yvonne Rainer’s quizzically outmoded RoS Indexical. Staged at the hidden Hudson Theater, a gilded little opera house tucked into the Millenium Hotel in Times Square, the event was meant to reference the infamous opening night of the ballet at the Theatre Champs-Elysees is Paris in 1913, at which a riot of sorts broke out between camps who thought the music was pure shite, and those who knew its genius.

RoS Indexical is not genius, but it started out on a good note. The dancers (Pat Catterson, Emily Coates, Patricia Hoffbauer and Sally Silvers) enter the stage, which is occupied only by a grubby couch and a card table with four CD walkmans on top of it (what, no iPods?) and four chairs set up around it. They take seat in the chairs and put on the headphones, and after a small pause, you hear them begin to sing along to The Rite of Spring’s notorious opening bassoon passage, using, “Da…da da da da da da da” as a libretto. This is hilarious and a wonderful pomo touch. But before long, you suddenly hear an orchestral version come soaring through the pipes. The singers stop once the prerecord gets to “The Augers of Spring” (that’s the head-banging passage that is likely to make your heart race), the table and chairs are taken away, and the women begin dancing. And that’s what they do for the rest of piece.

The sound score is taken from the audio track of “Riot at the Rite,” a BBC film that attempts to recreate the events that transpired at the opening-night scandal way back when. The only riot that broke out during RoS Indexical was an embarrassingly staged mini-riot that was forced half-way into the piece by thirty or so people who were planted in the audience, who suddenly began shouting, came up onto the stage, swept away one of the dancers, and then calmly, and civilly, took their seats again without any interference from either security or the audience: A sad moment for the dance world, but nothing to riot over. You were more annoyed than incensed.

The whole thing just had a terribly stale feel to it, which can probably be attributed to a reliance on the concept of indexicality to generate content. At one point, several black banners with random words printed on them dropped from the rafters. What does “Aargh” index? “Decay”? “Who? Me?”? Ultimately there is no meaning here, just words.

The costumes, by Elizabeth Hope Clancy, obliquely reference the costumes from the original Nijinksy production, and are made with t-shirts and jersey knits, all mismatched and crossed gartered to create a disheveled sportiness. But they don’t match the cool moderation of John Jasperse’s t-shirt creations for Misuse liable for prosecution, nor the flashy sportiness of David Neuman’s feedforward. They speak more to a cluttered, dingy studio of yore, rather than to the aesthetically rigorous and academically informed work of other contemporary dance artists.

To press the point, there was little to be said of material use. The couch got some treatment with a seated dance at one point, and then at another point the women rolled over the back of it and onto the floor. Kleenex boxes came out and were used as shoes, but that ended abruptly with the planted audience disturbance. And there was no true integration of the film audio score into what happened on stage. Eventually, it just looked like they were dancing to the music.

And the dancing: There is nothing technically or conceptually impressive about the choreography. It holds on to a naivity that was perhaps essential to the development of postmodern dance, but that today, comes off as small-town knowhow. As Claudia La Rocco succinctly pointed out in her Times review of the “An Evening With Grand Union” Performa screening, most New York choreographers have digested the dance work of the 1960s. Unfortunately, Ms. Rainer, who has come out from some kind of choreographic hiding to create this piece, is still chewing on the pulp.

The second and final performance of RoS Indexical is tonight at The Hudson Theater. Showtime is at 7pm.

C.C. makes a New York Times debut!

So we’ve been following L. Ro.’s ArtsBeat coverage of Performa 07, as you know. And we were moved, for various reasons, to address some…concerns we’ve been having. Long story short, we posted this hot comment, and they actually published it! It totally relates to our last post. And we’re fired up over it all!

Basically, we feel that, in all of the talk about Performa and performance art and dance’s place in the art world, Chez Bushwick is getting way left out of the conversation. So we stepped up to point out a few things. We also think this is representative of a general dismissive attitude to younger work and efforts made by young artists to create new models for performance presentation that really deal with today’s economic environment.

I encourage any and all to join the fray. Comments are the best part of blog culture. Well, the best and worst.

Here’s our full comment:

Why is nobody talking about Chez Bushwick?

They have successfully forged a relationship with the Ronald Feldman Gallery. In December of 2006, they presented “Salon”, a series of three performances by artists including Ann Liv Young and Michael Portnoy (both art-world favorites). Chez Bushwick is even hosting their annual benefit at the gallery this weekend.

Even in this line of discussion that bemoans the passing of the 60s, which many of us are very bored by, no one has brought up that Chez Bushwick has, in a very new way, carried on the tradition of collective efforts toward progressive performance. Yvonne Rainer has even performed at Chez Bushwick. To list all of the artists that have passed through Chez Bushwick’s halls (even if they were the halls of a gallery, a gutted warehouse deep in Bushwick, or its own studio) would make this a very long comment. (You can see the ridiculous list here: http://chezbushwick.net/artists/history.html)

What makes it new? Chez Bushwick understands the time in which it exists. The creative community in New York is a business-run community. Dancers and choreographers seem very left behind in this reality. Chez Bushwick has managed to find a sustainable way to address financial needs of artist (everyone who performs there gets paid) without sacrificing an openness to new work, which has included people pissing and vomiting on the floor, a notorious lecture on how to cook a lobster that inspired a mini riot, to Ann Liv Young shoving a broom up her everybody-knows-what.

There are artists carrying on the spirit of experimentation in New York. And there are choreographers who have found galleries that are receptive to hosting dance. They’re simply being overlooked: Because everyone is looking backwards.

— Posted by Counter Critic

Choreographers: Claudia La Rocco got your back.

The 60’s nostalgia that folks have been mainlining during this year’s Performa extravaganza, has been irking me to no small degree. You all know how we feel about this. While I’m down with taking the best things we learned from that era, and moving forward with it–recognizing the present we live in–I hate all of the bellyaching that usually comes from people who were alive then, which isn’t something they earned, but rather, is more an act of chance.

So kudos to L. Ro. when, at the end of her piece on the dance film series focusing on unseen film documents of 60’s Judson and Grand Union dances, she calls out Performa organizer and Performance Art History Guru, Rosalee Goldberg:

…Performa’s founder, RoseLee Goldberg, is wrong to suggest, as she seemed to do in brief remarks Monday, that contemporary New York choreographers must reconnect with the conceptual and intellectual rigor of early postmodern dance. The Judson era may still be a guiding preoccupation in France, but here it has been well digested and is just one more artistic strategy for choreographers making different, more culturally relevant re-evaluations of performance than the landmark but now often dated work of the 1960s and ’70s.

Damn, I felt like I was taking crazy pills! It’s unfortunate, though, that Goldberg comes off as being so out of touch with the dance world.

BTW, has Performa been to Brooklyn lately?

Claudia La Rocco has been pulling some serious shit down at The Times. The Young One seems to be doing her darnedest to keep it real, and keep it fresh, and has definitely learned a few lessons from her crusty days of yore. So we thought we’d dedicate a post to a selection of recent offerings, offering, of course, our own C.C. twist and shout. Let’s get started!

Jump all the way back to yesterday, here’s L. Ro.’s earnest parsing of Cast No Shadow, a collaborative work between film artist Isaac Julien and choreographer Russell Maliphant that opened Tuesday at BAM, and is also presented under the ubiquitous Performa 07 label. She’s pretty hardcore about not liking Maliphant’s sensibility, which seems bad enough to have inspired her to use these potentially hazardous phrases; “too conventional, too digestible,” “least sophisticated,” and “too literal.” Sounds like a last resort of sorts. We didn’t see it, so, whatever, we’ll just blindly agree cuz she’s our B.F.F.

Next, she reviews the murky, quirky shaker hoedown, Borrowed Light, by Tero Saarinen Dance Company, also at BAM, but non-Performa. We were hesitant to like this, but it really worked in the end, just being what it was. Although I would have liked more musical variety. It was all monophonic, and the singers of the Boston Cameratta, though sounding nice, were miked ever so subtly, but enough to fuck with any chance of really hearing sound come from different parts of the stage: It all came from the speakers. L. Ro. was down wit it, and seemed to want to follow them out onto the street in ecstasy. I don’t blame her. And yes, we could pretty much see everything from the back of the house. (Wir arme leut!)

Then there’s this piece that came out of nowhere today. It’s a preview about dance programming for the kiddies. Coming up, I guess, are Food For Thought at DTW and a gaggle of other shows. The best part of the piece is when she interviews Mommy Dearest of the dance world, Ann Liv Young, about what’s good for children in terms of art and entertainment. You can probably guess how we feel about Ms. Young’s credibility as an adviser for the humanitarian treatment of people under the age of five days old.

And not to be overlooked is L. Ro.’s uphill battle to turn The Times‘ “blog”, ArtsBeat! (exclamation mine, although they might consider), into something of interest to people who actually know how to use the interweb. Her writing there is way more informal and lively, and is dedicated to…do I have to write it again?…Performa 07. In the latest post, she and Sulcas get lost downtown while trying to locate a site-specific dance event. Classic! She also lays a little more into Russell Maliphant’s participation in Cast No Shadow.

Don’t fuck with this girl, I’m telling you. She’ll call you out faster than you can say “Marina Ambramovic is a crazy bi-atch.” At any rate, this blog is gonna be about as “cool” as the Gray Lady will get anytime soon. They even published 5 whole comments!

Dance Review: Jerome Bel’s Pinchet Klunchun and myself at DTW

(Photo by Chris Woltmann)

Do yourself two favors: 1. Don’t read this review. 2. Go and see Jerome Bel’s Pichet Klunchun and myself at Dance Theater Workshop, presented in partnership with Performa 07. Then read this review.

Of course, I usually try not to discourage readership on this site, and I also try to refrain from really plugging a show. But I know, had I read a review of this performance, I probably would not have gone to see it. And should you choose to go, this review will be the equivalent of a the spoiler of the century. Trust me when I say that you will not walk away from the experience without a sense of having witnessed something rare and truly worthwhile. You will also, most certainly, have a better grasp of our very particular creative moment, which positions contemporary artists at odds with our own classical forms, and in skeptical view of the classical forms of other cultures.

The talk of the town will most certainly be: But is it dance? You have to really use the broadest definition of dance/choreography to come up with an answer that is “yes.” In the performance–and we can, at the very least, safely say, “Yes, this is performance”–the well known French choreographer (we’ll call him, even though he says he is “not a real one”) and Pichet Klunchun, a Thai choreographer who specializes in Khon (Thailand’s equivalent of western ballet), sit across from each other and re-enact their first meeting, which takes the form of two interviews: First, Bel interviews Klunchun, then they switch roles.

When I walked into the theater and I saw two chairs facing each other, separated by about twenty feet, two bottles of water and a laptop, I was sure this was going to be an utter disaster, a pretentious piece of shit, and something unduly excruciating that I would not be able to escape for the two hour duration I was forewarned about. But after the first noticeably rehearsed moments, when Mr. Bel begins to carefully Mr. Klunchun those simple questions that begin any interview with someone you do not know–what is your name, what do you do, etc.–the two performers eventually settled into a convincing naturalness. Although most of the credit here must be given to Bel. With his theatrical, understated charm (those puppy dog eyes) and a general disheveled, anti-hero demeanor that makes you want to either A.) shrink him and keep him in your pocket (as my companion for the night suggested), or B.) clean him up and make an honest man out of him. Either way, his pathetic vulnerability makes this work, and convinces you to trust what this piece is going for. And what is that, by the way?

If you’ve tried being a contemporary artist lately, you’ll notice a list of dos and don’ts that smack the head of your creative consciousness out of nowhere, like glass walls that burly handlers suddenly swing across your path while your head is down, furiously trying to figure out which way to go.

The first glass wall was bequeathed to us by modernism. That is the one that has the “break from classical forms” tape stretched across it. We are in the habit of breaking tradition in order to reveal the new. That is our, at least, Western expectation of a contemporary artist.

The second, comes from a flawed impulse, which seemed, often, to fuel modernism (but had also fed many of Romanticism’s fantasies), to explore the aesthetics of non-Western cultures. I dare use the term primitivism, but only because others have used it before me. It’s common for Western artists today to take up the study of Eastern forms of music, dance, literature, and most rampantly, film. But there is a large contingent today that works against this impulse, feeling that that kind of process is just replacing our own outdated forms with someone else’s outdated forms. The practice also has a cult of fetish about it, one that idealizes and appropriates. And–as confirmed by Klunchun–the traditional forms of other cultures tend to fall prey to tourism, losing true national identity and becoming more of an amusement that convinces Westerners that they had in fact had a “cultural” experience.

Pichet Klunchun and myself communicates this quandary perfectly, smartly, and in a way that is sincere in its investigation. Bel sits, deeply inquisitive, as he asks Klunchun to demonstrate certain aspects of Khon. We learn that, among other things, death cannot be represented on-stage in Khon (bad luck), and that the general shape that the body learns in Khon is meant to imitate the architecture of Thai temples (a more literal and convicted demonstration of the Western Christian concept of the body as “a temple”). We can all appreciate Kohn in a way we are taught to, that it is a traditional art form, and because of that, it should be valued. There might even be things we find beautiful, but ultimately, it has its place in the past or in a Thai hotel. Still, Klunchun’s mastery of body will impress anyone.

When they switch roles, it is thrilling to watch Klunchun, who had just spent an hour, ironically, as Bel’s monkey (ironic because the character of “Monkey” is the only of the four traditional Khon characters that Klunchun refused to demonstrate–it’s not his specialty) performing rigorous, disciplined dance, now observe the apotheosis of contemporary anti-dance: Bel standing perfectly still, sheepishly, unpretentiously looking around the room in his frumpy clothes (tan carpenter pants and big, hot pink button-up that is not tucked in; sleeves rolled up; white Adidas).

After this particular demonstration, an excerpt from Bel’s 2003 work, The Show Must Go On, when Klutchun says he is disappointed, he expresses the main complaint of many dance lovers who expect to see leaps and jumps and twirls (what is often referred to as danciness) and get their hearts broken, and even feel offended, when not only are there no leaps and jumps and twirls, but when the choreographer seems to be intentionally trying to disappoint them.

But Bel goes on to explain himself to Klunchun, that his work is a “critique of the society of spectacle.” Bel even dismisses his own headiness with a shake of the hands as he’s trying to explain this, but he’s convicted in his heart about his reasons for creating this kind of dance–as a contemporary artist–and he is able, in the end, not to convince us that he’s right, or that his way is the better way, but that there is purpose and meaning behind what he does that can be explained and has cultural value.

Even if you’ve managed to read this far, you should still go see the show, since it is, I fear, maybe even more entertaining that this review/dissertation. And I’m not sure what the point of all of this is, other than, there does seem to be a crisis in contemporary art. Not a kind of crisis that is going to bring the whole thing to a screeching halt, but a crisis of communication that threatens people from enjoying as much as they could in contemporary art. We fear most what we do not understand.

There is an argument out there right now that basically suggests that if a work of art cannot communicate everything on its own to a virgin audience, then the art is academic, pretentious, and ultimately self-serving. But we need explanations for all sorts of things in life. As humans, we have the capacity to appreciate, and we generally learn to appreciate through education or some kind or other. It was an altogether mesmerizing and soul-filling experience to watch Bel and Klunchun demonstrate their very different crafts to each other. Each recognized the autonomous human value of the other’s work. Bel is captivated by Klunchun’s demonstration of a woman crying. Klunchun is moved to recall his own mother’s death when Bel performs his “Killing Me Softly” solo, which is brilliant and funny sad. And in a different way than the Khon is brilliant and serious sad. Underlying Kohn dance is a historical intelligence that is linked to language. Whereas Bel’s work is given its strength by a contemporary intelligence. Khon has a codified system of signs that refer to literal objects, ideas and characters. Whereas ballet is closer to mime than sign language.

The final moment, in this exchange of cultural and artistic viewpoints, culminates in a moment of pure intensity when Bel tries to perform one of his dances that requires nudity. Klunchun stops him and stands. Here is a limit of Klunchun’s willingness to experience Bel’s sensibility. He claims it’s cultural, but there are holes in that argument. But Bel, knowing better than to push–and perhaps knowing that this will make a tangibly suspenseful end–agrees to accept this limit. As they stand in a final face off, they both agree that there are no more questions between them.

The art of this piece is that it is fully scripted. And it works best when it feels like it isn’t, which, fortunately, is most of the time. It’s also very entertaining, and it communicates massive amounts of information, in a way that works of art cannot always communicate on their own. This is art about art. Dance about dance. And mainly, it is about today.

“Pichet Klunchun and myself” runs tonight and tomorrow at DTW (showtime is 7:30PM)

Damn, girls! This discussion is totally jump starting over at Chase Granoff’s “bOredOme” blog. Hot.

Well, actually, L. Ro.’s been bloggin’ about Performa 07 since late October on ArtsBeat (at Les Temps). And she plugged Granoff’s site in this post (which also contains a nice comment from C.C. friend, Catharine Dill).

So I swung by bOredOm this morning, and lo and behold, erbody’s chattin up a storm over there! Check it out and join in the fray, that is, if you care to split hairs between art-world performance art and dance-world performance art.

I think the most important debate is actually, who really can claim to have executed the first “Happening?” I’ll throw my hat in to the ring and say it was me: In 2nd grade, I innitiated a time-specific, site-specific kissing event that occurred on the jungle gym from 2:10PM-2:25Pm.

It’s still John Jasperse Day!

Claudia La Rocco comments on the bizarre absence of NY choreographers from Performa 07’s matrix-like schedule in her ArtsBeat coverage of the second installment of the bi-annual festival. She also gives her own two cents about Misuse:

On an unrelated note, I was at the Brooklyn Academy of Music [Wednesday] to see “Misuse liable to prosecution,” the latest thoughtful, sensual feast by the choreographer John Jasperse, and yet another person brought up how disgusted he was by the lack of contemporary New York choreographers who were invited to participate in Performa.

True dat, L. Ro. When you catch your breath, maybe you can give us a little more dish on what you thought about JJ. We know you want to…