Critical Correspondence

E.J. McAdams in response to Kathy Westwater’s “PARK”

E.J. McAdams

It is hard to say when the performance of Kathy Westwater’s PARK began:

When we the audience met the John F. Kennedy ferry at the Battery?

When Raj Kottamasu, a member of the Parks Department’s Freshkills Park team and our guide, told us the history of the landfill and jokingly said, “If you lived in New York before 2001, you helped build this park?”

How about when Jennifer Scappettone, Westwater’s poet-collaborator, got on the bus in an all white paper frock, designed by Jesse Alpern, and passed out cards asking us to write down three words in all caps about what you think about when you think of Fresh Kills (SEEN FROM SPACE) and about what you might have put in the landfill (MICROWAVE DINNER TRAYS)?

I had expected it to start when the audience got off our air-conditioned tour buses at the base of the North Mound where we could see dancers dressed head-to-toe in white with the white paper frocks, bright in the sunlight. All the other whites in this green and yellow-green expanse stood out: the bellies of tree swallows diving and looping in the periphery and oblong clouds. From where we stood to the top of the cap, the dancers lined up like topographical markers – it was an instant survey of accumulated waste.

Over the mass rattling of their costumes, the dancer at the top of the mound shouted: “SAY ANYTHING LOUD!” Another dancer responded: “YOU ARE COMMITTED!” “YOU ARE COMMITTED!” rolled down the hill dancer to dancer like run-off, as the dancers walked up the hill and then over it. They were gone. We were left with silence, then the emergence of red-winged blackbird calls conker-reeing in the reeds and the itchy static of dragonfly wings. Did the performance begin? Were we committed? Was I?

We were ushered back to our buses and circumscribed the base of the North Mound before we ascended to the top. I can only imagine that Westwater wanted us to have a kinetic experience (as kinetic as you can have in a bus?) of the breadth and height of the mound. My attention honed from the suspense of the shouting, I was able to “feel” it in a way that I hadn’t when we visited the other capped landfill mounds with our guide.

We exited the buses once again. A rough burnt smell hung in the air. Methane? The oil refineries in Jersey? The New York City Sanitation Department’s compost operation? It diminished as we approached the performers who warmly welcomed us and asked each of us to place our ear to a plastic cup strung by a taut white string bending in the wind to another plastic cup with a dancer speaking into it. My first approach I couldn’t hear what was said but appreciated the intimacy after the long distance we had traveled to be here. In the second cup I listened to, I heard words I had written (SEEN FROM SPACE) and realized that these transmissions were not from the dancers but were from the audience to the audience. It was magic: our landfill words recycled.

After everyone had a chance to listen, the dancers dropped the “phones,” so the white string was marking the edges of spiky grass, and retreated away from us again while encircling the audience. Among us there were four bags: one filled with socks, one with styrofoam, one with plastic, and one with silver mylar. As the dancers neared us their swishing movements through the grass stirred up black swallowtail butterflies and more dragonflies; some of the dancers lost their frocks to their movements’ interactions with the wind. Jae Lee collected these in a pile. For that moment we were in the center.

The dancers were mumbling words off our cards as they moved, through us, toward the center. Westwater invited the group to circle the performers so closely I could read the words (“SAMPLE DOT”) and numbers on the frocks. There, a game began: a performer read the words on her card and then gave it up to someone else and so on: as soon as a performer read and gave away his cards he sat down. Until one was holding all the cards.

Gently the dancers spread us out toward the periphery of this circle, inside Kazu Nakamura and Ursula Eagly began a duet. Much of the vocabulary of the movement was reminiscent of the version of PARK I saw last Spring at Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), but the vocabulary looks different in the openness of the landscape. The movements that felt so jagged and pained indoors, reverberating off the room, feel free like vectors heading out multidirectionally from the site of the dancers’ bodies – that energy may (or may not) return, but certainly not immediately (possibly in other seasons the way birds migrate out and back). There’s a moment when the dancers connect winding up slowly together into a new state of being, only to then have that state change, unraveling quickly. So many times in the movement of the piece I felt we reached these tipping points that were followed by collapse. It was very tempting on the peak of this mound to remember video footage of Fresh Kills, the backhoes piling garbage up and it crashing over.

Now, Eagly crossed the circle to the bag full of plastic and lied on top. Rebecca Davis claimed the bag of socks, while Rebecca Brooks made the bag filled with styrofoam her territory. Scappettone entered the circle and recited words from two scrolls that two other performers held; many of the words were lost to the soundscape but some register – “Lenape” is the one I remember now. One of the most memorable moments from the DTW performance was the instance when the silver mylar on the floor cascaded over the audience to create this extremely intimate place where the dancers read Scappatone’s words in a choral, bodily way that became resonate in the ear, the mind, and my own body. It was one of the most profound poetry reading experiences I had ever had. To close this episode here, the dancers throw down their frocks and Jennifer throws down her poems, like her words they tumble away in the wind.

Other dancers rushed toward the last plastic bag full of mylar and lay it out. This moment was so striking at DTW because it literally transformed the whole space into light—and it was very dazzling here because unlike the many lights in the theater there is only one source—the sun—here. It gave a reflected “body” of sorts to the sun that then moved, flowed, undulated, and whipped to gather up the dancers. Where I saw the mylar as a kind of jagged mountain range “out in the West” in the DTW performance, here it seems a shiny landfill mound that is placed outside the circle of the audience on the capped landfill.

More circles. Rebecca Brooks went to the center, where she moves and chants and jerks and arches and speaks about a “time machine” and lifts up and chants again and again. In an orbit around her were a group of dancers, their hands full of surprising articulations. The furthest ring had runners, running in circles, around the dancers – but within the circle the audience made. Moment by moment performers ended their movements and placed their paper frocks on Rebecca Davis. They wrapped her in paper, tucked it in her shirt and pants, stuffed it under armpits until every piece was settled. Then they carted up the rest of the detritus: the water bottles, the “phones,” the mylar, the socks, and started down the road away from the circle and audience, leaving in the center this woman readjusting her body in an effort to balance this blowing, rippling, rattling mass. Enrico Wey ran around her. A few pieces of white frock blew away and Westwater gathered them and stuffed them in Davis’ socks until every piece was accounted for. Westwater also started down the road. Finally, the en-papered performer started down the path, the runner now walking behind careful to grab anything that blew off.

This last image is very mercurial. I see her as a cloud, a clumsy white carnation, an angel, a tumbleweed, a tangle. There is something Buster Keaton-like, something wonderfully comic and pathetic about this woman who holds onto this paper burden without tipping over. It was hard not to root for her in this balancing act as she drifted out of our circle of awareness.

Was that the end? The conversations among the audience members kicked back in, as we discussed all that we had seen and experienced, but in the distance we kept catching the dancers out of the corner of our eye as they descended the mound on foot. After we loaded back on the buses, we drove past them and it was clear that the dancers had continued their encounter with the landfill, picking up discarded bottles and other trash, extending the “leave no trace” ethic of the performance. Maybe that is why I was compelled to write this down because I wanted to leave a trace of this dance, a dance that seems to have no beginning like a dream and no ending, only this awakening into the way we precariously move about on a landfill over the Earth. Were we committed?

Credits for PARK:

Choreography/Direction: Kathy Westwater; Poetry & Text Scores: Jennifer Scappettone; Art Direction: Seung Jae Lee; Performance: Maggie Bennett, Rebecca Brooks, Rebecca Davis, Ursula Eagly, Melissa Guerrero, Belinda He, Kazu Nakamura, Jeremy Phieffer, Jennifer Scappettone, Kathy Westwater, and Enrico Wey; Paper Dress/Shirts: Jesse Alpern; Rehearsal Assistant: Abby Block; Consultant: Rebecca O. Johnson