One Less

Four choreographers imagine a world without [fill in the blank].

by Deni Kasrel

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Published: Sep 1, 2009

Lindsay Browning Co-artistic directors Myra Bazell and Madison Cario (L-R) in TIDE

"I didn't want it to look like a theater. It's the end of the world."  That's Madison Cario explaining why there's no stage set for TIDE, a work she's co-directing with Myra Bazell for the Live Arts Festival.

TIDE is one of several Live Arts works where creators start with the concept of taking things away and then play with the results. In the case of TIDE, the eradication is expressed by extreme nothingness.

Inside Crane Arts' minimalist ICE BOX Projects Space, the scene at a recent rehearsal is appropriately stark. The room — ceiling, floor, walls — is all white. There are no props, and lighting fixtures are spare. And while they're not in makeup now, come showtime performers will sport white ghostly faces.

TIDE is inspired by Cario and Bazell's interest in eco-psychology, the study of how humans' well-being is directly tied to the Earth — and vice versa.

"The subtext has to do with the fact that there's this decay and destruction happening. Even though climate change is likely to happen anyway, we're clearly part of that, but it's not one big bang for us," says Bazell. "Some of the piece revolves around that ... and [the characters] are in a barren place. I like to say we're on the precipice of time."

In tune with the barren set, audience members must also use their imagination to envision scenarios in TIDE, presented in the abstract, which include performers riding on a rocky ship in a turbulent sea and dealing with the psychological distress of being stranded on a tiny island.

For Headlong Dance Theater's more. , which imagines what might happen when our bodies go away, displacement is displayed through action, objects and music. According to Andrew Simonet, one of Headlong's three co-director/choreographers, "It's part of the internal rules of the piece. [Dance often] inexorably flows from one thing to the next, and you're pulled through the piece that way. Here, the performers are constantly abandoning things. It's a little bit like if someone says, 'Go make 30 copies of this,' and so you make 30 copies, you're done, and you go find another task."

The performers literally move more. 's set onto the stage. They put it together, then gradually take it apart and reconfigure it again. Music is truncated. Abandonment is ongoing.

More. 's underlying context concerns how much work it is to live in our bodies, and what it would be like if we no longer had to deal with that. "There's this huge private world of the job of the body, and as you get older it gets way more elaborate. It gets more acute," says Simonet. "There's a set fact that the job of the body ends at some point. You're going to get fired and you don't know what happens next."

Simonet assures that more. isn't morbid, nor does it purport to have answers as to whether there's an afterlife, reincarnation or any other question regarding what happens once we expire. It just supposes we might become something else. "We're trying to draw this portrait of the body as a really exhausted machine and as a kind of glowing exuberant force of nature. ... Things are happening simultaneously. There's a lot of density," Simonet observes.

A multiplier effect is especially pronounced in Kate Watson-Wallace/anonymous bodies' STORE, which, like TIDE, is based on the aftereffects of a global calamity, only in this instance the room is chock-full of stuff: clothes, TV sets, boxes and video screens.

The premise is that a group of people find themselves in a ramshackle store following an undisclosed apocalyptic event. "Part of the work deals with their transition into a world where there isn't this exchange of product or money and they're still operating by those same rules," Watson-Wallace explains. "So it's delving into the rules of consumerism and trying to relocate them to see what they look like when the landscape isn't the same."

She created the overstuffed space to represent an image of excess. "That's what I feel we're up against in this world in general," she says. "We're constantly encouraged to buy and to have ... but what if the rules of commerce changed?" STORE envisions that when there is no system for buying anything anymore, then "experience becomes a product."

Perspectives get truly twisted with above under inbetween. Created by Austrian artist Willi Dorner and his company, whose bodies in urban spaces took to the city streets for last year's Live Arts Festival, the piece takes place at ICE BOX; akin to more. , it features props carried in by the cast. Furniture pieces, like a chair or table, are used much differently than in real life. Dorner wants us to see "if we can give it a different meaning."

These objects become physical shapes to be thoroughly investigated through body movement, often to the point of absurdity. "I use these shapes to exaggerate, to point out the relationship of the human body to its architectonical environment," Dorner states. "Very often our preconceived ideas of an object prevents us from using it differently. Or generally speaking, our preconceived ideas prevent us from seeing the world in different ways. I think that as an artist you have to give new perspective on our so 'well-known' world."

(deni.kasrel@citypaper.net)

// TIDE, Sept. 4-7, $25-$30, ICE BOX Projects Space, 1400 N. American St.; more., Sept. 10-14, $25-$30, Arts Bank, 601 S. Broad St.; STORE, Sept. 4-9, $25-$30, Former Rite Aid, 4237 Walnut St.; above under inbetween, Sept. 11-12, $25-$30, ICE BOX Projects Space, livearts-fringe.org.

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