MR Festival 2008: 80’s and 90’s On Screen

by Lana Wilson
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There

At the end of the 60s and 70s, many New York dancers and choreographers had tired of what some saw as the minimalism, restrictiveness, and lack of meaning in postmodern dance. As Karole Armitage (one of the most noticeable exclusions from this film program) has said, she wanted to say “yes” to everything in Yvonne Rainer’s famous “No Manifesto.” As 80’s and 90’s On Screen shows, “yes” is what so many other choreographers said during these decades too—yes to the explosive, virtuosic movement of Sondra Loring and Lisa Race, yes to the extended limbs and personal content of Neil Greenberg, yes to the emotion and lyricism and overt politics of Bill T. Jones. Although the four-hour duration of the program bordered on sadistic, 80’s and 90’s On Screen offered a rich, diverse, and much-needed look at New York dance in these two decades.

The evening, which was presented in chronological order, began, appropriately, with a seminal figure from the 1960s postmodern movement, Steve Paxton, who has continued to create innovative work in the decades since. His 1982 piece, Bound, showcases his remarkable abilities as a soloist—wearing a white t-shirt, dark pants, swim cap, and aviator sunglasses, Paxton looks frighteningly alien-like, performing a series of phrases in which his torso is kept tightly erect as his limbs move through a series of complex articulations. One of the most arresting sections has Paxton seated between a baby’s cradle and a rocking chair, both empty. In silence, he pushes first one, and then the other, fixing his gaze on each of them, until their undulations slow and, eventually, stop. It is an unnerving scene, progressively suggesting absence, loss, and delusion, and made even more chilling by the harsh top lighting and Paxton’s sunglassed stare.

Another highlight of the 1980s half of the program was Meredith Monk’s 1983 dance film, Turtle Dream. Four black-clad singer/dancers are locked in a robotic psychodrama (at one point, both of the female dancers apparently start losing control of their movements, making erratic vocal sounds, while the two men calmly gaze straight ahead, smoothing down their gelled hairdos when the camera cuts to close-ups of each), and a slow-moving pet turtle wanders through a moonlit, miniature model of a city.

Choice excerpts from the bawdy, hugely influential performances of Dancenoise, a double dose of work by Ishmael Houston-Jones—in performance documentation from the wrenching f/i/s/s/i/o/n/i/n/8 (1984) and in a hilarious cameo as a performance artist in John Sayles’ Brother From Another Planet (1984)–and Tere O’Connor’s Heaven Up North (1988)–featuring mesmerizing group work and an eerie, David Lynchian pastel set–were some of the other highlights from the 80s half of the program.

The 1990s brought some gorgeous contact work (Wally Cardona and Shelley Senter in Irene Holtman’s Red Cap), a terrific box-spring slamming duet by ChameckiLerner (HOMEADE, 1994), the always-hilarious antics of Scott Heron (here shown performing at a 1993 P.S. 122 benefit), and a fascinating clip from The Bill Moyers Show showing behind-the-scenes footage from the making of Bill T. Jones’s landmark piece Still/Here (1994), based on workshops with terminal illness patients—special kudos to the curators for uncovering that one. The 1990s did, however, also bring some rather dull and long-winded solo work (at one point, a friend sitting next to me muttered, “I miss the eighties”). But maybe we were both too worn out to give the 90s the attention it deserved—the second half of the program didn’t even start until the two-and-a-half hour mark.

I was jolted back to life when John Jasperse’s Excessories (1995) came on, though, making my determination to stay until the end of the program well worth it. An examination of what uses and displays of the body, clothing, and accessories are and are not sanctioned by society, the excerpt shown climaxed in a sequence–set to rhythmic, up tempo music–in which three men and two women pull their genitals and breasts outside of their clothing, and then matter-of-factly use these body parts to perform a poker-faced routine of pushing, pulling, jiggling, and otherwise “playing” their unusual instruments. It is outrageous, hysterical, and insidiously clever. It is historically significant–the breakthrough piece of one of our most important contemporary choreographers–and politically savvy–a work that interrogates our assumptions of proper behavior and private boundaries. It is proof that, while the experience of watching 80’s and 90’s On Screen was frequently trying, in the end the exhaustion was worth it—maybe you can never have too much of a good thing.

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