Under Cover Artist
Tanks under trees is a convergence of spoken word, dance, plastic arts and music that will test the limits of all of these various mediums. Even more provocatively, it will be performed in the Soho loft where choreographer Douglas Dunn has lived and worked for over 30 years. The salon evening is not just postmodern redux; the informal setting calls for experimentation. The close, contained space is like a mini-arena, Dunn says. Were all in this together. The two performances will be a chance for a few (seating is limited) to have an intimate look into the life and work of a choreographer who has fascinated for more than a quarter century.
Back in the 70s Dunn presented 101, a performance exhibit in which he sat still for four hours a day, six days a week, for seven weeks. He was presenting stillness as a theatrical experience, and it wasnt always met with applause. The legendary dancer has recently been revisiting themes to create a living legacy of new performances of his early works, but meanwhile the legacy continues. So this performance is being billed as a premiere, although poet Anne Waldman and Dunn conceived and first performed it as artists-in-residence at the Mitchell Center in Houston in 2006.
The focal point of tanks under trees is second-generation beat poet Waldmans theatrical reading drawn from her 2004 poetry collection, Structure of The World Compared to a Bubble as well as unpublished writings. In spite of information-age attention spans, the tagline on the announcement for his upcoming performance is also true to form: The manatee moves in slow-moving rivers, slowly, a line from Waldmans script. The poet will be familiar to many since she is well known for running the St. Marks Poetry Project from 1966 to 1978, and then she co-founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics with Allen Ginsberg at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado.
Painter Mimi Gross studio has been a three-ring circus of decor in-the-making as she tackles the set for tanks. She has collaborated on dozens of Dunn dances, and this creation includes a low-tech screen with shadow puppets in a lush pastel and painted backdrop. Gross is also costuming, in camouflage, Dunn and his small cast of individualist dancers: Paul Singh and Christopher Williams (a Bessie Award-winning choreographer and puppeteer) Jean Freebury and Liz Filbrun.
Dancing to words is a difficult feat to pull off, but Dunn has made a career of it in classic collaborations with Waldman, Robert Ashley and Robert Creeley, among others. For this piece, the dancers begin to rehearse after digesting Waldmans words, and then they weave established and improvised movements. Cellist Serena Jost and percussionist Robert Di Pietro are mining the text for musical phrasing, as well. Even the script, though set in stone, will change when Waldman performs it live, with Akilah Oliver.
The open structure is unusual for Dunn. Its highly tuned without being too mental, he explains. Dunn is a former Merce Cunningham dancer, and comparing the two is more than an academic pursuit, since Cunningham dances are created with music, dance and décor converging at the last moment as if by chance.
The evocative title, pulled from the script, recalls Persian poetry about the beauty of the natural environment ravaged by war. Waldman wonders about a world without gavottes, without gazelles. Its about the environment, everything in other words. This is a poem/ And this is a dance/ & this is a Song as a field of action. The challenge for Dunn and his dancers is to somehow rein it in to an integrated whole.
May 10 & 11 Dunns Soho studio loft, 541 Broadway, third floor (betw. Prince & Spring Sts.), 212-888-8888; 8, $10.