A tall man wearing black and his shorter female companion stands in the front row, directly blocking the view of numerous people around them, but refuse to move or sit down, almost escalating to a physical confrontation. A boy abruptly turns to his mother and audibly asks her a pointed question, “what is this about?” An older gentleman discreetly and slowly dry humps the woman with him, somehow managing to make it a tender-looking gesture. All of these took place at the presentation of Vienna-based choreographer Willi Dorner and his company at the Austrian Embassy last Monday, September 14, at first leading me to wonder if Dorner had requested audience members to be intentionally provocative. But no, I think you get people out of their chairs during a dance performance and strange things start to happen.
Bodies in Urban Spaces in Rouen, France
A woman from the embassy announced that the performers wanted the dance, above under inbetween, to take place amidst the audience, and so there couldn’t be any chairs. From the announcement I was expecting that we would all be roaming about a bit, but no. It seems the intention was just to recreate a proscenium stage setting without any seats for the audience. Perhaps the planners were taken aback by the 400 people who showed up, but the room wasn’t really conducive to all of us being able to see all of what was going on without any seating. Short women in the back craned to view the dance and elderly people gingerly lowered themselves down to the floor for a seat. If you’re going to complicate the physical accessibility of the work for a good number of the audience, it seems like there should be a pretty compelling reason and I couldn’t find it for this work. A friend of mine thought it was appropriate because the audience got to squirm and fidget, and there was no darkness to hide anything (perhaps the sexy wooer in front of me forgot this), and George Jackson thought it added to the audience’s sense of playfulness. I felt that the behavior of the audience members was at least as interesting as the work on the stage, and so maybe that was part of the point of the set-up.
more Bodies in Urban Spaces
Which is not to say that the work itself was un-interesting. The soundscore consisted of what seemed to be alien spaceships taking off and landing. The dancers were dressed in solid color t-shirts or hoodies and pedestrian pants; when they weren’t performing at the moment they stood on the side, looking neither bored nor interested in what was in front of them. Bodies accumulated in various configurations, as if Dorner had given his dancers a score to create the most unusual body piles they could come up with. Chairs and tables were used to good effect. Three dancers would nestle under a table, the table would be removed and the bodies would bear the imprint of where the object used to be. Or they would nestle within each other, three perfect zig-zag bodies stacked up one on top of each other. A formation would emerge and then one dancer would extricate herself, leaving her friends to suddenly be spooning empty space. Stakes were raised towards the end of the 50 minute work as the dancers began climbing on elements, adding elevation and speed to the body pile equation as the spaceships landed and departed with increasing frequency in the background. The finale featured a Rube Goldberg mousetrap like construction that the dancers bounced through.
Dorner will present Bodies in Urban Spaces as part of the Velocity DC festival on October 3 and 4. The work looks to have many of the same ideas as above under inbetween and they might be more compelling in an outdoor street setting; the pictures from other cities where the work has been done look promising.
