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
Innovation
By Ruth Catlow and Penny RaffertyMAY 2023 | Critics Page
In recent years DAOs have been heralded as a powerful stimulus for reshaping how value systems for interdependence and cooperation manifest themselves in arts organizing. The book Radical Friends Decentralised Autonomous Organisations and the Arts consolidates five years of research into a toolkit for fierce thinking, as well as for new forms of radical care and connectivity that move beyond the established systems of centralized control in the art industry and wider financial networks.

Marie Watt: Singing Everything
By Vittoria BenzineAPRIL 2023 | ArtSeen
Hundreds of chorusing voices, hands, and stories crest across Singing Everything, the second solo show at Marc Straus by Portland-based interdisciplinary and multicultural artist Marie Watt. For twenty-five years, Watt has collaged and sculpted blankets into layered wall hangings and towers that deconstruct the household objects symbolism within her own diverse German-Scot and Seneca heritageand the grander scale of the human life cycle. Were born on blankets, bond with them as teething children and slumbering adults, and die wrapped in them, if were lucky.
Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love
By Leah Triplett HarringtonAPRIL 2023 | ArtSeen
Lyle Ashton Harris: Our first and last love presents thirty-five years of the artists work, which often veers into collage, installation, and performance in an exhibition that is as much a cumulative self-portrait as it is something of a mid-career retrospective.
Taking Root, and Taking Flight
By Susan YungFEB 2023 | Dance
The eight dancers spend most of the hour-long work moving together in lockstep, or in small orbiting groups. When dancers break apart from the cluster, others rush to join them, or assist when another falters.