Find Yourself Here: Trio B is the second in a series of three trios, each consisting of two dancers and one visual artist, each built to relate specifically to the spaces in which they are seen.  Kotze herself dances in the first and third: Trio A, with Netta Yerushalmy and artist Jonathan Allen was shown at the Lu Magnus gallery in September and Trio C will be shown in February at SHOWROOM Gowanus with Silas Riener and artist Asuka Goto.  The purpose of Kotze’s residency time at BAC was to continue work on Trio B, with dancers Molly Lieber and Stuart Singer, and visual artist Zachary Fabri.  (Kotze is married to Jonathan Allen, and she met the other two collaborating artists when they and Allen all had Lower Manhattan Cultural Council Workspace residencies at Governor’s Island).  When I visited the studio, Fabri, Kotze, Lieber and Singer were all meeting together for the first time.  Kotze had just spent almost a month as a resident artist at Djerassi in California, but was only able to bring one performer with her at a time, so she spent a week separately with each dancer developing solos.  Her three weeks at BAC were meant to explore what it would be to have these two solos in the same space at the same time, together with the new element of Fabri, who works with digital media and superimposition, filming himself setting up a space and photographing himself, placing himself into pre-existing frameworks, building his work digitally as well as in real time as live performance.

Throughout the development of Trio B, Kotze has allowed the realities of her experience to feed into her creative process, and to inform the choreographic structure.  While at Bogliasco, Italy on a solo residency, she began exploring the notion of presence and absence, of being both in a studio and allowing herself to see what lay outside the room, the landscape that surrounded her.  As she continued her solo explorations in California, immersed in quietude, thinking about what was beyond the room, the dualities of pristine/urban and calm/wild began to take shape, and what energy hums underneath/beneath these various states. In exchange with Fabri, they began discussing ideas of visual landscape and framing, darkness, using a slide projector for the sound of the shutter and the capture of motion like a video still.  Initially, she developed a nearly forty minute solo in these residencies that she then used to generate the material for Lieber’s and Singer’s bodies, exploring an additional duality of “mine/not-mine”.  She continues to maintain a separate solo practice with the material, and in fact recently adapted it further into a new duet with Jonathan Allen for Danspace Project’s Performing the Precarious event at Industry City.

The night I visited BAC, the sun had set in studio 6A, and Kotze had asked the three performers to engage in a show-and-tell.  Lieber and Singer danced for each other, seeing the other’s movement for the first time.  The space felt like a beautiful cathedral of silence and attention.  Lieber went first, with long sweeping shapes, the pat-pat-pat of her feet running in a delightfully strange, huge circle with her arms twisted and extended over her head.  I was reminded of Joanna’s own pacing circle that opened it happened it had happened it is happening it will happen.  The geometries in her work always remind me of her architectural background.  What imagery do these mysterious, often humorous shapes emerge from?  Molly was doing a knee crawl on the floor, initiated by a big thrusting arm.  Lieber’s and Singer’s solos contained different explorations of similar themes.  Gaze--looking out, seeing out, Molly watching her feet, her hair cascading down over her head, her face disappearing, but still so deeply intent. Stuart walking so far downstage, to the very limit of the space.  Looking, seeing beyond.  The hardness and softness, the percussive walking, pacing.  Stuart watched his feet too. There are heel pounds, feet slaps.  I thought about the differences between Molly’s and Stuart’s bodies, male and female, their height, their very arresting dancing presences. This is the first time I am not seeing Joanna perform her own work (another absence).  The repetition of things.  They dance to the very edges of the room in a way that makes me so aware of the walls, of confinement, and feeling them wanting to burst out, exploding the container, not in a violent way, but because they are so full of this vital, vibrational energy.

When they’ve had a chance to see each other, there are a few notes, and the dancers each teach Fabri some moves from their solos. Then Kotze just charges ahead with the big question:  can these two dances occur simultaneously in space and time, and what will happen?  Zachary does his solo first. His shadow looms large in darkness lit intermittently with a slide projector, its shutter like a mesmerizing blinking of the eyes.  He’s a prologue to the dance, maybe like a Greek chorus, with such a different relationship to the body and training, introducing us to everything we are about to see, but in a deeply enigmatic way.  I think of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave.  I then watch in rapt awe as Lieber and Singer dance for another half hour, shocked at how much I’m seeing for the first time, though I’ve just focused so intently on them alone.  Somehow, dancing together puts each of them in such stark relief against and with the other.  The foreground and background begin to shift back and forth, there is a new dimensionality to the room, and the way the two are in constant relation and awareness of the other but with such an internal, studied focus is so exciting, at times dangerous. At some point Lieber lets out a yelp, nearly crashing into Singer as she launches into a blind run with head down.  They both keep dancing.  Moments of silence, of stillness, shock with power.  When they finish, I am speechless. 

It’s day one.

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Aaron Mattocks is a Pennsylvania native, Sarah Lawrence College alumnus, and 2013 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Award nominee for Outstanding Performer.  He is an associate artist with Big Dance Theater under the direction of Annie-B Parson and Paul Lazar (Supernatural Wife, Comme Toujours Here I Stand (revival), Man in a Case, Alan Smithee Directed This Play) and is currently creating new works with Doug Elkins and Courtney Krantz.  He is a 2013-2014 Context Notes Writer for New York Live Arts, after recently completing a year as guest editor for Movement Research’s Critical Correspondence.  His writing has been published by The Performance Club, Culturebot, Hyperallergic, Critical Correspondence, The Brooklyn Rail, Hartford Stage and the BAM 2013 Next Wave Festival.

He looks mischievously about, and drops his voice. But there's no shame here, since somehow deep themes of Strindberg—the divine visitor, the sense of humanity ignorant of its own loveliness—have managed to weave themselves tightly into the work.

Writer-director-designer Ondrejcak has more than a hint in his process of a crucial mentor—Robert Wilson. That same glancing contact with a story characterizes some Wilson processes, it releases a maker from “faithfulness” and lets only the deepest resonances vibrate their way onstage. In rehearsal,Elijah Green was made in this same spirit of the inspired accident. Actor-dancers ask for feedback, and Ondrejcak laughs, “I don't know! Do something else.” 

In response his performers sing snatches of song, look fixedly at ping-pong balls, invent wandering monologues on the spot. They generate constant impulses; he grazes among them like a cow in clover. “I use what's in the room, whatever object, whatever person,” he says. His attention span seems, at some moments, to be quicksilver changeable—then he'll lapse into a reverie watching something profoundly simple and still.

In Dream Play, the daughter of the god Indra comes to earth to try to understand human suffering. In Elijah Green, actor-dancer Yuki Kawahisa plays this role, or, rather, the echo of it, moving among the other performers with an expression of gentle, puzzled calm. Ondrejcak—who can seem somewhat eldritch himself—places her into strange scenarios: first a kind of gentle, sliding, seated ritual on top of a giant fiberglas rock, then an abrupt leap onto its surface, then a slow drifting into the others' arms for a sequence the group calls the Middle School Dance.

Ondrejcak is not himself a choreographer. The dance-maker Rebecca Warner (“Into Glittering Asphalt”) works with him, generating physical vocabularies for rehearsal, and making dance-sequences which Ondrejcak then tugs apart and refashions. In an early iteration of one of Ondrejcak's other works, Feast, performers stayed almost completely stock still, nattering to each other down an exaggerated banquet table. Now we can see his composer's eye for the still image working its way through movement as well. It's unleashed an excitement about sequences: one actor cuts tape into the shape of a grave, and, almost inevitably, staunch Ryan David O'Byrne must carry the giant rock around in a circle like a mild-mannered Sisyphus.

The Baryshnikov Arts Center residency has deeply affected the work. During its earlier gestation at a summertime retreat on Governor's Island, there were broad jokes—like the giant poo suit Carlos Soto wore in one improvisation. But the studios, set high up in the shining landscape of building-tops and the Hudson, have embedded the project in a kind of permanent, mystical aura. In this incarnation, “I think I'm figuring out the tone, the mood—it's white and neutral and pastel,” says Ondrejcak, whose academic training is in fine arts. One of his inspiration pieces is “a Japanese print, very clean, of monsters—which creates a very flat space. Looking around him at the studio, he muses, “I'm inspired by the light in this room, this very grey, foggy room.”

The next step after the residency involves text—right now actors do read long, strange monologues, but Ondrejcak thinks of them as placeholder text. Essentially, “I'm sort of freaked out by narrative...because it can turn the stage-scene into illustration. I'm always simply using text as another texture.” He goes on, “In the rehearsal room, I'm just working on the formal things—color, rhythm, line. When I'm in the writing process, it's very diary...most of it sounds like it comes from my voice. It's incredibly liberating: I can have my overt expressions about life, and then I can assign a character to say it and suddenly I lose ownership of it!” It's a kind of magic, one only a visitor to our world could make.

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Helen Shaw currently writes about theater for Time Out New York magazine and teaches theater studies and theater theory at NYUTisch. Previously, she was senior theater critic for the NewYork Sun and has contributed to the Village Voice, Performing Arts Journal, Playbill, TheatreForum, the Jewish Daily Forward, and the forward for Mac Wellman’s anthology of plays, The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. She curated the Prelude festival in 2011 and 2012, and coordinated programs at the Martin E. Segal Theater Center for approximately the same period. She also works as a dramaturg, and has assisted Martha Clarke, Lear deBessonet, and Simon McBurney. She has an MFA in dramaturgy from the American Repertory Theater Institute at Harvard University and a BA in Anthropology from Harvard.

Material she developed during her residency at BAC was shown at the end of March. A trio for three women with the working title "Sister to a Fiend,” this piece is overtly ritualistic. Two matching cups are repeatedly held aloft as if in offering, or a means of channeling, and they are also hurled to the ground, as if in anger or pain. Spiritual symbolism abounds, but the body is central to the proceeding. There is molestation. Energetic transfer. And what Kim refers to as “the table top human body, and they are taking what they need.” All three women appear to be in trance states, but not all the same kind—some are supplicant, some ecstatic, another desperate. Ultimately, through repeated and varied interactions, the three connect through a physical mutual dependence.

Before the showing, Kim answered a few questions about her work and process.

BMcC: For those who may not be familiar with you or your work, how would you describe what you do?

Dance is so weird. Really, truly strange. On some level I find it completely vulgar that anyone would put people on a stage just to watch them move around.  Really?  WHY?  It can be so presentational, so precious with itself, and I find that repulsive as an aesthetic value.  But, I think that's fundamentally why I'm driven to make dances, and why I remain curious--I'm trying to better understand the form myself, and I'm convinced that there's so much more to it.  Historically speaking, dance is still in an incredibly incipient stage.  Now we're in somewhat of a thaw after the fixation on and tyranny of beauty.  For lack of a better word, my work is experimental.  I'm interested in what's beyond beauty and how dance can be the platform to express a wild range of truth and experience.  Fundamentally, I am an outsider working in an outsider's form, playing at the edges and seeing what that yields--I'm involved in a personal game of brinkmanship.  Everything I know about making dances came from making dances.  Yes, I am a dancer, but I discovered dancing and choreographing almost simultaneously back in my late teens.  My love of composition (choreography) is separate from my love of dancing.

I do subvert the form a lot.  There are red herrings in my work--some people are often unable to see past them.  I'll use overexposed pop music, have people move like zombies, act like stroke victims, but I'm not being contrarian for the sake of being contrarian--all of these elements were necessary content or counterpoints to the tone I wanted to create.  Part of the challenge and interest for me is to deliver the content functionally and rigorously, no matter what it is.   

I've always taken heart in what David Lynch said about making "Blue Velvet: "it started with red lips, a white picket fence, and a severed ear.” That's all he knew, and that was enough.  I feel the same about every dance I've ever made.  I might know one or two things about it, but really, I have to take a leap of faith and make it to understand it. 

This latest work springs from a work I made in 2007 called "Cult."  A lot of "Cult" was built through improvised "incantations."  I've brought back this score and have used it to start a lot of my rehearsals.  It allows the performers to drop in to the right tone of this work, they literally thicken the air around them (I can feel it), while they simultaneously practice being seen.  The thrust of this work is about the strange relationships between women, especially powerful women.  They're not quite human, but they are definitely female, and they have secret rites, which I expose through the dance.  The ultimate experience of this work is getting to see this. 

BMcC: This new work combines symbolically loaded gestures, with some radical sensuality and a healthy dose of subversion. What art, ideas, rituals, imagery, etc are you drawing from for the construction/performance of this work?

SK: I wanted to extend everyone's arms and I also wanted to work with objects that had potency, potential talismans, so I brought in a set of vintage '70s cocktail cups.  They're clear for the most part with a little bit of red and yellow, and they're also an unusual rectilinear shape with a curve thrown in. They've been very generative as objects to respond to--to give energy to, and to get energy from--they've served as a direct line of transmission to forces greater than ourselves.

I started this work, in the studio, during a residency I had at MacDowell back in the fall. There I danced with real, glass stemless wineglasses.  I wasn't afraid of getting cut, but I did shatter one...so for practical reasons I'm still working with the plastic cups for the group, but we'll see.  Glass has more power than plastic.   

Films are always very important to me as inspiration, and I think there's something intrinsically filmic about my work.  A LOT of my favorite films are about weird relationships between women:  "3 Women," "The Bitter Tears of Petra von Kant," Breillat's "Bluebeard," "Mulholland Drive," etc.  I've told the performers to have a gander at these films.

BMcC: How has the residency at BAC influenced your capacity to explore your artistic process?

SK: By providing a real choreographic home for 3 weeks, for providing 5 hours of rehearsal time every day without financial constraint. It allowed me to breathe easier, relax into the process. By the end of it, a 5-hour rehearsal really seemed the norm, not an infinite period of time. To inhabit this psychic framework of "yeah, this is my job--this is really how I spend my day," was incredibly liberating. The content just seemed to tumble out fast while in this state of mind. The studio I was in was also incredibly beautiful--light-filled with a dramatic view of the cityscape. This all helped set a mood, and I felt deeply supported by the city itself. 

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It wasn’t pretty.

They were quickly lost, and when they finally made it back to the studio, everyone was intensely emotional. Mitchell recalls it as being, “really weird,” but he knew he’d hit choreographic pay dirt. He set up a camera and told his dancers, “OK, let’s dance…let’s see what comes out of our bodies.” Those filmed improvisations became the core material for Interface, an exploration of visceral and emotional reactions that Mitchell expects to be more of a multi-media piece than a dance.

It’s fair to say that this comfort with creative meandering is unusual for a seasoned Cunningham dancer. Although Cunningham often relied on chance operations for how a dance would look in performance (meaning the movement, sound and visuals are independent of one another and order is determined by a roll of the dice), the actual steps, and how they should be executed, were, as in classical ballet, imposed on the dancers by the choreographer. So Mitchell’s willingness to let his dancers’ movements dictate the look and feel of a new work is a certain kind of daring.

“I really like to work with people who have minds of their own,” he says. Mitchell encourages feedback from his dancers while sifting through their improvised movement, discovering the emotional intent behind it, then trying to separate one from the other and recombine them in novel ways – something he describes as a layering process.

In Interface, Mitchell plans to add even more layers including an original electronic score by Thomas Arsenault and design elements by artists Nicholas O’Brien and Fraser Taylor. Factor in the expertise of the dancers working with Mitchell during his time at BAC (Cori Kresge, Melissa Toogood and Silas Riener) and you have a passel of talent converging on virgin territory.

As if that isn’t intrepid enough, Mitchell and Riener will be co-creating an improvisational duet to be performed at Anatoly Bekkerman’s ABA Gallery as part of BAC’s fall gala evening. The challenges for such an event are many and Mitchell admits that it’s scary. Although he’s used to performing in unorthodox spaces from his years with the Cunningham company, Mitchell says a gala event is a little different. “It’s always sort of strange to figure out where people are going to be and whether we’re going to interrupt the socializing.”

Dangerous? Perhaps. Frightening? Yes, but most creative efforts are. Mitchell, however, appears to be willing to pull his collaborators close and step carefully, and bravely, into the unknown. 

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