Nothing on Nothing

Dance performances rarely seem intended for an uninitiated audience. Take a poll and the majority of the audience will be: a) dancers or choreographers, b) friends of dancers or c) friends of the dancers’ friends. More than half will most likely be comped or somehow invited to view the performance. The rare neophyte feels like a stranger at a co-worker’s birthday party, not getting the allusions, jokes and references that elicit knowing grins, chuckles or applause from those around the popular gal who seems so much smarter and prettier than you.

For some time now dancers have been responding to this fact and attempting to break the insular quality of the dance cult by exposing process, dancers’ personalities and eschewing the presentation of polished work intended to be Art. The choreographer [Tere O’Connor,] known for his own distinctive attempts at engaging new audiences, goes one step further with [The Nothing Festival](http://nypress.com/20/16/abouttown/about1.cfm), which he curated at [Dance Theater Workshop ](http://dtw.org/)and involved eight choreographers/dancers given no guidelines who were then asked to create something from “nothing.” Great! Usually I end up having someone asking me, “What was that about?” No worries this time around, it’s about nothing. Thanks.

I missed the first week’s four choreographers but made it a point to attend the second installment which included [Jon Kinzel], [Luciana Achugar,](http://www.villagevoice.com/dance/0647,jowitt,75124,14.html) [Susan Rethorst](http://www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org/grant_recipients/susanrethorst-1.html) and [Walter Dundervill](http://www.nypress.com/19/45/listings/dance.cfm) because yes, I too fall into that camp of insiders (I’m friends with Dundervill and attended for free). I was accompanied by someone with a highly sophistical aesthetic sensibility (and whose sister was a principal dancer for world-class ballet companies for many years). So, I admit, like most in the audience, I had something invested but not too much (since I hadn’t forked over money) and disappointment is only fleeting.

Kinzel’s “Quirk-Ease,” which involved sweet music and charming choreography (as well as an overhead projector and the addition of a ringtone played on a cellphone and an elaborate background made of tape quickly rolled into a ball and discarded) came and went quickly. It was followed by Achugar’s “Franny and Zooey.” After it was over, my partner leaned over and whispered, “How Vassar.” Ouch. But I completely disagreed. I felt it had an evolved visual language. With a dancer collapsed on the floor, it began with a film projected on the back wall, which depicted Achugar interacting with her cats in a studio. The film had the gritty quality of surveillance footage and seemed to be a commentary on the fact that many choreographers film their improvisations and then commit them to memory through rehearsal. It dragged at points and seemed redundant but midway through, it reached its transfigurative moment. The film showed Achugar, dressed in a navy hoodie, crawling away from the camera, her rear exposed. She then performed the same fleshy, rhythmic movements live on stage as it was projected, continuing to crawl, spreading her vagina, until she reached the back wall. This was followed by a frenetic dance to a club-music beat until she was completely naked and the other four female dancers all ended up in a sloppy pile of legs, boobs, arms and blue material and popping buttons. For the finale, the fivesome danced to “Chicken Noodle Soup” with a projection of the YouTube [Dancing Dora] behind them, ending in an unapologetically female explosion of joy.

For Rethorst’s “208 East Broadway” we were handed disposable, cardboard binoculars (goody!) to watch the seven women as they explored the tactile world of objects (a finely-crafted fish tray, beautiful furniture). It was the actions and observations of those in her apartment, dismantled, reinterpreted and put upon the stage. They measured and touched everything with their bodies: a stylized furniture commercial for dancers. Frank Lloyd Wright’s wet dream. Domestic femininity vs. a vagina in your face, something that NYTimes dance critic Jennnifer Dunning, [in her anemic review], preferred much more.

Like Achugar, Dundervill also wanted to show process in his “Would You Read My Poetry?” and so had his two female dancers  on stage, already wearing huge gray pseudo Marie Antoninette wigs, as he wrapped them in fabrics, tied them with ribbons and dressed them in quasi-period outfits, followed by his own strange greenish pajama-like costume that covered his head and was tied in long, orange ribbon. He then laid down in the center of a large square of fabric with green ribbons at the corners. The soundtrack also involved a dance club beat. It felt as if he, along with Achugar, were acknowledging: this is how most people experience dance – in a club, with a strong bass-line, not in the stiff, orchestrated way we present it here in the theater. Dundervill’s performance was a surreal landscape of fetish and unusual visual cues (a male performer slaps Dundervill and is then stripped of his pants, which bind his legs; performers sit and bounce as if in some private auto-erotic moment; the female dancers ride Dundervill’s back like a pony, stand on him in heels). 

O’Connor’s conceit that all the dancers start with “nothing” was intended to will these choreographers to step outside of the world of dance and the market. It ultimately forced them to do what most artists typically do: they used themselves as the subject and stepped back into themselves (as dancers) and their own subjectivity. This isn’t to mean they failed, but it does result in a personal discourse that, as usual, disallows entrance and interpretation by those who don’t gain entry into the club. But let’s not blame dance, this is a general symptom of Art—be it film, painting, video, performance. Ultimately O’Connor achieved the opposite of his intention: a “trade show” of talent, to display his friends and colleagues so that they too might gain access to the next, higher level where resides.

Top photo by [Sandra-Lee Phipps] Second photo by [Julieta Cervantes](www.julietacervantes.com/)