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Dancing to Drink By

dancemOpolitans
new works by Clare Byrne and Amy Larimer, Tami Stronach,  Kriota Willberg, Wendy Osserman, David Grenke, Gerald Casel, Sara Hook, Laura Peterson, Jessy Smith, Jenny Rocha
The Public Theater
New York, NY
February 10, 2006

By Tom Phillips
copyright ©2006 by Tom Phillips

DanceNow/NYC kicked off its 2006 season in the rowdy atmosphere of Joe’s Pub, with its usual mix of energetic exhibitionism and serious new choreography. For a second straight year, much of the latter was contributed by two artists: dancer Mary Cochran and choreographer-dancer Laura Peterson.  Both are onto something new. Cochran, who last year played a crazed cheerleader with a gun, has moved from hyper-patriotism to hyper-eroticism. Peterson, who last year was some kind of crawling pest, has descended from the subhuman to the inhuman, into the origins of the computer age. 

Cochran’s solo, “Valeska’s Vitriol,” is described as homage to the late Valeska Gert, a cabaret performance artist of the Weimar period in Berlin who was famous for her brash, satiric style and her fascination with the grotesque. The music, by Sidney Torch, sounds like a barrel organ from Coney Island, and the choreography by Sara Hook has a bug-eyed Cochran pushing her desperate sexual needs into our faces—pretending to squirt milk from her breast, grabbing her crotch and finally hauling a guy  from the audience onto the stage, to satisfy her relentless drive for a lap to sit on.  Daintily, she takes off her panties under her skirt, and sits contentedly on the hunky stranger’s knee.  Grotesque is the word, and Cochran is a contemporary master of the idiom.  She’s able to exaggerate and even shock, without losing her comic timing and control.   

Laura Peterson’s new work-in-progress is a tongue-in-cheek tribute to the minimalist aesthetic of the 1980’s—as in the vacantly glowing fluorescent tubes of artist Dan Flavin, and the  droning technopop of the German band Kraftwerk.  Peterson has her company of four dancers combining a minimal series of robotic moves—turning and whirling flat-footed, flapping their arms rigidly, rising straight as a pin, then melting to a circle on the floor.  This was the dawn of the computer age, and the rising and melting calls to mind the endless series of ones and zeroes representing the universe of information that has become our environment. Kraftwerk’s song has just two lines of lyrics:

                        “I program my home computer

                        I beam myself into the future.” 

sung in a south Asian accent that eerily foreshadows the guys in Bangalore who supervise the software of 2006.  Peterson is an artist of the infrastructure, an observer of the banal underpinnings of our sensational, illusory world.  Deep, and funny.

Most of the artists on the bill looked to be in their twenties or even teens, with one noble exception.  Wendy Osserman this year is marking the 30th anniversary of her company, dancing with people who weren’t even born when she started it.  She choreographed her new piece “Imagine/non lethal force” to a potent score by Tom Compagnoni, who mixes Beatles’ songs (Imagine, Give Peace a Chance, Sgt. Pepper) with samples of President Bush talking about his desire for peace.  The costumes—men’s suits worn backwards by the three women—and the choreography of stumbles, kicks and collisions conveyed W’s own menacing mix of awkwardness, geniality, and brutality.   

Osserman’s piece was timely enough:  anticipating both Valentine’s and Presidents days, it opened with a rendition of “My Funny Valentine,” with just one word changed, so that the ending becomes

                        “Stay, little president, stay —

                        Each day is Presidents Day.” 

A nice piece of seasonal ephemera, which we hereby store forever in Kraftwerk’s unthinking, unblinking computerworld.   It deserves to live somewhere.

Volume 4, No. 6
February 13, 2006
copyright ©2006 Tom Phillips
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last updated on February 13, 2006