MR Festival 2008: Dance for Music by Matthew Lyons

by Matthew Lyons
MR Festival Spring 2008: Somewhere Out There

As someone who programs both dance and music and produces many interdisciplinary events, I was very interested to see the results of this evening’s program. Talking with the evening’s curator Chris Peck, I learned that he selected the musicians and then asked them to choose a dance artist without guiding them in their choices.

In his introduction to the program, Peck let it be known that there was nothing to be done about the loud, intermittent HVAC unit. Control over that was surely tied to a huge NYU bureaucracy for the whole building and beyond, but I thought Brian Eubanks’s low, beating drones from his laptop and analog synth played very well against the existing room tones, turning the whole gymnasium into a sounding box. In dialogue with this, Jessica Ray moved through a progression of dance phrases in which her center of gravity lied somewhere above her shoulders; her head seemed to steer the forward motion as she turned over her ankles. Then there was a middle sequence of more centered passages of paces and walking, followed in the end by the top-heavy motions from the initial section. In terms of the collaboration, I felt that Eubank’s kind of soundscape is actually quite prevalent in today’s dance scene, and the relationship between the sonic and performative in this piece didn’t seem to invert much in the usual dynamic between choreographer and musician.

I was familiar with Jessica Pavone’s work in the downtown music scene and was looking forward to this second pairing between Pavone and Rachel Bernsen. I have to admit that, in this section in particular, I missed having a program for the evening to tell me what composition I was hearing. Pavone was clearly playing a score of some sort. I assumed it was her own composition but would have liked to know what it was, from when, a few words from the composer, etc. Bernsen’s movement, much of it on tip toe held in static positions or stepping as if on invisible stilettos, moved in and out of synch with the plucked phrases and clusters from Pavone’s electric viola and delay pedals. I remember one such moment in which Bernsen jumped in place with arms held straight overhead; to me it marked a moment of abandon or release in contrast to the more constrictive movement vocabulary she developed. And in general, the intensity in her face or in her overall physicality (even while lying rigid on her side with her back to the viewers) was well matched to the deliberate quality in Pavone’s playing. In the final section, Bernsen disappeared from the performance area entirely, and we were left to consider her absence while weighing Pavone’s lovely solo of reverb pizzicati. I noticed a few fellow audience members listening intently with closed eyes.

As for the third piece, what an entrance! Jennifer Mesch tumbled out of the stairwell door just as Nate Wooley’s extended technique trumpeting began its non-stop push and pull of air. With Wooley and Newton Armstrong on electronics placed almost totally out of view inside the stairwell at the corner of the performance area, Mesch explored her position as the intermediary between the audience and her fellow performers. She shimmied up the doorframe. She used the door to mute their sounds and then closed herself and the musicians off completely from the audience. (Another strong moment in the evening created by absence or, in this case, distanced performance.) Overall, I felt that Mesch was investigating ways to make her performance a significant contributor to the aural environment of the piece, which to me was a successful and thoughtful choice especially in the context of this program. In addition, this was the shortest piece of the evening, and its succinctness was one of its many other strengths.

I admit I didn’t have the best seat to see the final piece comprised of a jazz trio led by David Luther and a quartet of burlesque artists organized by Melinda Myers, but my favorite element was seeing Jon Moniaci move about in a brightly colored, foam tropical fish costume which challenged his ability to quickly pick up the discarded pieces of clothing between the titillating acts.

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