All kinds of people, trivially and profoundly, have tried to pin down dance, to define what it is and is not, and some of them get quite feisty if you challenge their definitions. So let us relax a little and pay heed to what artists are actually doing. Manhattan (and the rest of the city and the country and the world) is awash in artistic performances that may derive from dance, may be billed as dance, but are just as easily described as a hybrid of dance and something else — or as something else entirely.
Looking back over the season since September, in my perambulations through the world of dance, I’ve encountered all kinds of hybrids. One of them, the Polish Teatr Dada von Bzudlow at La MaMa, continues through this weekend.
There was Mark Morris’s delightfully loony, joyful version of Purcell’s “King Arthur,” which came from London and was seen in Berkeley, Calif. It was billed as opera but, stripped of its “book” by John Dryden, was really more theatricalized dance. There was Constanza Macras and her Dorky Park dance troupe from Berlin at Dance Theater Workshop, whose piece embraced all manner of theater, film and live music. Shen Wei Dance Arts at the Joyce was dance, but, given Mr. Shen’s training in art, as much a visual experience as a choreographic one. Caitlin Cook’s “Skint” at the Kitchen was rambling, quasi-improvised dance mixed with rambling, quasi-improvised rock music.
Sarah Michelson’s “Dogs” at the Brooklyn Academy of Music became increasingly theatrical as it progressed. Meredith Monk, also at the academy’s Harvey Theater, is a one-woman hybrid, since she started as a dancer but prefers now to be thought of as a musician, and incorporates photography and video into her work as well. Witness Relocation’s “Dancing vs. the Rat Experiment” at La MaMa was a lively, conceptually overflowing if often incoherent collage of theater and dance, reviewed by critics from both fields. Most recently, last weekend, there were Teatr Dada von Bzudlow’s “Several Witty Observations (à la Gombrowicz)” and Claude Wampler’s “Performance (Career Ender)” at the Kitchen.
The Polish von Bzudlow troupe bills itself as a theater and played at La MaMa, which is primarily devoted to experimental theater (as in its sobriquet E.T.C., meaning Experimental Theater Club) but has long been refreshingly loose about what it presents. “Several Witty Observations” is billed in a news release as dance-theater, and compared with most of the performances mentioned above, this was more unambiguously dance than any of them.
Maybe it was different back in Poland. I am not familiar with the writings of Witold Gombrowicz, the dissident playwright and novelist during the Communist years on whose diaries this piece is based. At the outset of the performance a man whispers in Polish, untranslated. Perhaps in Poland there are more such verbal interpolations, pushing the work toward a true blend of dance and theater. But even the Polish reviews refer to it as primarily dance.
As such it is interesting without being sharply distinctive. Leszek Bzdyl, dark-haired and handsome, is the choreographer and troupe leader. He is first seen in the lobby, lying on the floor and placing his head into a trash bin. Onstage he is joined by Rafal Dziemidok, big and bald, and Katarzyna Chmielewska, who provides the female erotic element.
They interact with two large inflatable sculptures, one a large mattress, the other a large footstool or round sofa. There is atmospheric music by Mikolaj Trzaska and a foray into the audience to pass out enigmatic slips of paper. The dancing is purposeful, energetic, sometimes sexy and funny, but never quite convinces as dance or dance-theater. But maybe it means more for connoisseurs of Mr. Gombrowicz.
Ms. Wampler’s piece is entirely different, and far more thought-provoking. But even though it was organized by the ubiquitous Ms. Michelson, who did “Dogs” and was also curator of “Skint” at the Kitchen, and even though it was billed as performance and dance by the Kitchen (which had no idea what the mysterious Ms. Wampler would do when it printed its publicity), this was only dance in the most oblique sense.
But it was fascinating, whatever it was. Ms. Wampler comes from Pennsylvania and has been active in New York as a dancer, performer and visual artist. Her program gave only the odd title; no other information was provided, not even her name.
Instead there were two texts, one about polar bears drowning as the arctic ice melted beneath them, the other about a 7-year-old boy who swam from Alcatraz to San Francisco. In a subsequent telephone conversation Ms. Wampler suggested that the performance might shed light on the texts. No such luck for me, unless the idea was to encourage polar bears to become better swimmers.
What the audience saw was a setup for a rock trio: a cartoon-illustrated amplifier, real keyboards and a drum kit. The musicians, led by a singer who played electric bass and who led the “rehearsal” and gradually stripped down to silver briefs, spent 55 minutes tinkering with their music. They sounded full-bodied and pretty good, somewhat reminiscent of the Doors, though the singer had a higher voice than Jim Morrison. But they weren’t “real”; they were projected: the singer clearly, against his backdrop, the others more ectoplasmic against the omnipresent smoke.
Finally a black-clad woman (Ms. Wampler, it turned out) brusquely flattened the singer’s set and on came the same musicians, live, to blast through their song at considerably higher volume. Followed by a long blackout during which nobody in the audience knew quite what to do. End of show. With no dance evident at all.
Yet maybe there was. Upon questioning, Ms. Wampler identified the musicians as the John Carpenter Band (not the film director). Joey Albanese was the drummer and Debbie Chou the keyboard player. Ms. Wampler added that she had kept her program devoid of information to prevent the audience from using it as a “crutch.”
With that in mind, one had to suspect that a goodly portion of the audience was part of the performance too, from those who stalked out angrily, to those who stood up and boogied to the live music, to the man who insisted on bringing a weird, patched-together backpack into the theater.
The boogying was dance, I suppose, and to the extent the audience was drawn in, their boogying was too. Maybe some of Mr. Carpenter’s contortions on video were choreographed. But what Ms. Wampler was really doing, as she has done before, was challenging the conventional relationships among creators, performers and observers. Her piece was always engaging, technically superb, sonically appealing.
Was it dance? Not really. But the excitement for critics and audiences alike in so many performances these days, from downtown to Brooklyn and beyond, is to ignore the old categories, or at least not fret if their expectations are thwarted. Artists are eager to mix things up, and audiences better be ready to go along for the ride.
