Dance
Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group: 3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, But Still Only Two Dimensions
Aynsley Vandenbroucke Movement Group (AVMG) formed five years ago and has danced at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, Dance Theater Workshop, and the Joyce SoHo, among others—so they are not the newest of newcomers. But their opening performance of 3 Dancers, 4 Chairs, 26 Words at the Center for Performance Research in May gave me the impression of a promising “emerging artist’s” piece being offered at a workshop.
The show begins with three female dancers dressed in black walking in and sitting side by side in metal folding chairs. One calls out selections from the title’s list of 26 words: “beginning,” “walking,” “grave,” “bird,” “flying,” “emptied,” and the dancers either react to the implied command or stay still. They scoot their chairs forward or back in unison, stand and dance in place before sitting again, switch places. Throughout the dance, the modes change, but the same model is used repeatedly: the dancers stand across the stage from one another and yell words; they use overhead projectors to broadcast the words to the audience—sometimes they react visibly to the sounds and sometimes they don’t. The words never exactly come to form a narrative, and the dancers never build much of a relationship with them; everything stays separate and static from beginning to end.
To be fair, this may be part of the point. On AVMG’s website, 3 Dancers is described as “formal and stark...The piece asks if a dance with text can retain the open and direct nature of pure movement. Can words be abstract? How does grammar affect movement?” These are interesting questions, but their exploration and any possible answers get bollixed up here. I wouldn’t say that the text in this dance interferes with the direct nature of its movement, but since the movement itself doesn’t seem to be directly communicating anything in particular, it’s hard to say if anything could cause interference. “Can words be abstract?” Sure, when they’re presented individually, without building toward a larger idea or story. “How does grammar affect movement?” In this dance, we’re not given a chance to see, since the words never push past singularity into sentence-hood.
3 Dancers does excel in some key ways. It does convey a real mood—stark for sure; also two-dimensional, true to its black and white color palate. And the dancers are full of heart, sometimes even appearing to enjoy themselves too much for what is billed as a serious, if not, somber, piece (as when, after grunting, “Man… man… man…” at each other with different inflections and gestures from opposite sides of the stage, a couple of them could not contain their giggles). But for art to truly succeed, it has to communicate something. 3 Dancers needs to become either a more robust, detailed explanation of its purported theoretical roots or grow and embrace some story lying dormant in its 26 words to be anything more than a work in progress.
Contributor
April GreeneApril Greene, the Rail's dance editor, lives, writes, and bikes in Brooklyn.
RECOMMENDED ARTICLES
Himali Singh Soin: The Third Pole
By Ruba Al-SweelDEC 22–JAN 23 | ArtSeen
Himali Singh Soin’s solo exhibition The Third Pole at The Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza in Madrid spans five years of the artist’s work, ripping through the fabric of our reality to reveal a more-than-human world, one brimming with characters that defy characterization. From queer alien figures and animals down to posthuman entities and even sediment, the artist tells stories across time, species, and geography that swing, in a kind of dialectical poetry, between human and nonhuman narratives.
The Historical Present: Collective Solitude at Coenties Slip
By Prudence PeifferJUL-AUG 2022 | Art
For the past five years I’ve been consumed by the story of a group of artists who lived and worked from 1956–1967 in nineteenth-century sailmaking and maritime lofts on a three-block radius at the southern tip of Manhattan, near the Battery and South Street seaport. They were a motley crew who all came from outside of the city and settled (illegally) into rough but cheap open spaces on Coenties Slip, one of New York’s oldest streets. Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman had just returned from Paris, carrying with them a legacy of abstraction but also an ambition to paint something new. Agnes Martin arrived from the southwest, already thinking of how the city’s landscape could structure her compositions. Lenore Tawney was starting over after another life in Chicago, eager to continue inventing ways to expand a loom’s capacities.
Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s
By Alfred Mac AdamOCT 2022 | ArtSeen
Cora Cohen: Works from the 1980’s is a time capsule, and like all time capsules it is an enigma. Time capsules are supposed to provide people of the future a sample of things typical of the moment when they are buried. Which raises the critical issue of perspective: are we to understand these eight glorious pieces according to what we think they meant thirty-five years ago, or should we understand them according to what they say to us today? Even if we lived through them, the 1980s are as irrecoverable as the 1880s: an abyss separates us from that decade even if human time—memory—may trick us into thinking we actually know that remote moment perfectly.
Mike Davis with Pac Pobric
By Pac PobricMAY 2022 | Books
In the past thirty-five years, Davis has published around two dozen books, including a brief history of the car bomb, that “inherently fascist weapon” (Buda’s Wagon, 2007); a Benjaminian study of the fault lines underlying Los Angeles’s contradictions (City of Quartz, 1990); a startling account of the pressure-cooker-like conditions of squalid cities around the world (Planet of Slums, 2006); and a searing analysis of the American working class’s many disastrous defeats (Prisoners of the American Dream, 1986).
