The Bridge Project 2014:
Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?
Hope Mohr Dance
in association with Joe Goode Annex
Sep 26, 2014
From the program:
“For its fifth anniversary, HMD's
Bridge Project presents Have We Come A Long Way, Baby?, a program
that celebrates and explores a West Coast post-modern dance lineage
through an intergenerational lineup of female soloists.”
Anna Halprin
The Courtesan and the Crone (1999)
Anna Halprin, one of the most
innovative, experimental and influential of dance artists, performed
a mime piece; a five minute dance-theater work wearing a Venetian
mask that was a gift from her daughter and a floor-length gold cloak
that she previously wore to the White House. 94 years old. Fragile.
Eager to make contact. To move. To move us. To touch. I felt lucky to
share this moment that vastly transcended the actual choreography and
yet of course was deeply implicated in its embodied narrative and
mimicry, desire and nostalgia, power and loss. Halprin's courtesan
was articulate and unabashed. She presented the mask of a younger
woman and the body that still remembers her, at least in gestural
fragments. Her crone fluctuated between grief – what have I become?
– and a calm resolve or affirmation. We applauded. Anna smiled and
bowed and exited carefully, each step significant.
Simone Forti
News Animation (1980-current)
An improvisation about water, Syria,
cockroaches, a baby... is also an improvisation about Simone Forti,
aging, improvisation, politics, and art. A way or reading and
re-reading the news, News Animation, since 1980, has modeled a
creative process for bridging the many gaps between Forti's (and
perhaps y/our) lived experience and the political realities presented
and framed as news. White haired and 70 plus, she knows her body, how
it can get to the floor and back up without excessive effort, how it
feels.
Meandering movement – she reveals an
artist looking and finding – but then the mood shifts sharply as
she walks directly toward us, speaking, “So we're bombing Syria.
And we don't know why. And they tell us it's to protect the homeland.
(pause) The homeland.” It's easy to say that of course we should be
talking about Syria today and of course we don't know how, especially
in public. Forti accepts this ethical challenge gracefully. “We
want the borders that we established after WWI to hold.” Is it her
age, her quivering gestures, the humbleness of the situation (a small
studio theater, an audience of dance people) that help us to see the
tragic absurdity in this statement? With her head gently bobbing
beyond her control, she gestures, “If I'm the map, Iran is on this
side (right thigh), and Saudi Arabia is on this side (left thigh),
and Iraq is here (hands form a triangle over her crotch).” I'm
reminded of Deena Metzger's late 70s or early 80s efforts to map the
world onto the body, a feminist imaginary that recognizes the many
resonances between one's body and one's world, between one's
perception and one's projection. Considering her own body/mind/self,
Metzger asked questions like, where are my borders open and where are
they fortified? Where is there starvation or drought? Where are the
rivers dammed and where are the war zones?
Forti emerges from a similar era of
feminism and an art scene whose political critique of art and society
led them to share creative process as “product” (Prioritizing
“practice” as Arrington and Hewit might assert). For News
Animation, Forti reads a newspaper and takes notes in the form of
poetic journaling. In tonight's performance the notes were read live,
an exposure of process but also a deepening of the material,
revisiting it but from the past, rewinding time to reconsider the
now. “Colonialism. I can never remember so I reach for my colon.”
Her body grounds and recontextualizes language, perhaps patriarchy
and its logic as well. Reading from a notebook, head bowed to the
page, white hair vibrating with her shakes, she recounts a dream of
power men and their penises and closed sexual circuits that exclude
everyone else.
A dance with a white sweater and scarf
shifts unexpectedly into a story of fish that know how to organize in
solidarity and resistance. Forti is a gentle master. Using the
tactics of innocent (or is it subversive) children's theater, she
transforms the clothing into a snowy Montana horizon along her body
(mountain), and then admits to failing to represent the milky way...
Perfect and imperfect, her imagination always in process of both
refinement and wilding, an ethical feminist artist researcher child
whose failures are gateways to magic.
Lucinda Childs
Carnation (1964)
Performed by Hope Mohr
White chair. Black table. Red leotard.
Blue jeans. Her right foot in a blue plastic bag. A kitchen sieve
treated as an iconic or holy object. Carefully she constructs
sandwiches from green sponges and pre-cut carrots that fit the width
of the sponge. Color and form redux: Fluxus tasks, Dada disruptions,
Judson deconstructions. Carrots ceremoniously inserted into sieve
create an altar of orange radiance, then a crown when place
delicately on her head. Many sponges are stacked vertically and one
end inserted into her mouth. The mask is further manipulated by
cramming the fanned gaps of the sponges with the carrots from her
crown. The game ends by spitting everything into the blue bag removed
from her foot.
At the back wall she does a headstand.
In precarious balancing she performs a circus act with socks and a
white sheet and she disappears. Ta da! It recalls certain
actions/images in Xavier LeRoy's Self Unfinished, created 34 years
later.
She captures air in the plastic bag and
it stands unsupported. Another circus act with magic fully exposed
and yet it's still magical, that is, whimsical, unexpected, and
previously unimagined. She looks at it. Stomps it. Smiles. Proudly.
The smile turns on and off. Then she cries. Steps away. She performs
tasks with arbitrary rules that must be obeyed. If this isn't the
essence of art, it's one of them.
I propose this work for an Izzy: best
reconstruction of 2014!
Hope Mohr
s(oft is) hard (2014)
Performed by Peiling Kao
Sound by Ben Juodvalkis, Video by David
Szlasa, Costume by Keriann Egeland
We hear the sound of writing, by hand.
A mix of knocking and scratching. Peiling faces away from the
audience but her face, in close up, is projected, large, as if
staring back at us. She is wearing black tights and a blue crocheted
top. A voice over, Hope I presume, tells of writing 89 journals in 20
years. She recites specific dates but not the entry that follows...
After reading through the journals while making this piece, the voice
tells us that she recycled all of them except the first and the last,
numbers 1 and 89. I believe her and vow to hold on to my old journals
even tighter.
There is a more complicated
relationship between text and movement, or language and embodiment,
than in the previous works tonight's program. More dates. More sounds
of writing. More silences. More shapes and gazes and self-touching
gestures and other dancing movement. Minimal piano accompanies the
continued chronological progression of dates...we're in the
90s...then 2000s. Video is intermittent. We switch from face cam to
feet. Peiling's breath becomes the dominant text as her movement
increases in vigor. Today's date. Tomorrow's date. She rolls and
jumps repeatedly. A virtuosity that impresses, viscerally. On her
back, the lights fade, slowly.
Resources:
Deena Metzger
I can't find the actual reference that
was a radio piece from the 80s but here's her current work:
Xavier LeRoy, Self Unfinished (1998)
PS:
I am an enemy of the slow fade to black
at the end of a dance. Also the device of the blackout to begin a
piece, to tell the audience that it has begun, and to allow the
dancers to enter the space unseen (or the suggestion of unseen since
I can almost always see and hear them). The framing of the stage or
the theatrical moment with darkness is a cliché, a trope emptied of
any specific meaning that carries more ideological weight than
dancers in the US are taught to consider. In San Francisco I witness
these devices at almost every concert I attend. In the “contemporary”
dance scenes I frequent in Europe or New York, they are extremely
rare, and when they occur they are more likely to be conceptually
integral to the work.
