Gary Keegan (co-director) is onstage facing ¾ away from me hunkered at a console on which sits a laptop running projections. Feidlim Cannon (co-director) sits in the middle of the front row, legs crossed, his forehead in his right hand. To his left is a young man named Neimhin Robinson Gunning who (in the fragment I see) will voice a man throughout his entire life all in one moment. He wears a gold lamé jacket and sunglasses. Across the stage in the shadow with his back to me is the Sean Millar the composer. I never see Jessica Kennedy the choreographer.

Feidlim asks the young man in gold to stand in the spotlight (well, once there is a spot. They are in tech mode and lights are flipping on and off. Feidlim says maybe “it could just be him.” The lights settle, the young man rises.)

My paraphrasing memory recalls him asking and answering the following:

“Where’d you have your first kiss?  On a boat.”

“What age were you?  25.”

The narrative timeline speeds up but not the pace of delivery:

“I’m 31.” (Sometimes the young man speaks in German with Gary projecting subtitles- I learn later this is their first go and all are relieved they work.) “I’m 38. I’m 42. I’m bald and have a potbelly, I’m 53. I’m 60. I’m 64, 68, 72…”  I remember thinking, they have crossed right through my own age and that it does sometimes now feel that fast.

A break is called so Gary, Feidlim and I head toward coffee

I ask about the genesis of the pixelated aging material I just watched. Gary says it was happening all around them, his parents, himself, his children: that it is one of the few things that happens to every community. “…and we have assumptions about how kids should feel as they grow up….how parents should eventually maybe slow down a bit…”

Feidlim says, “We’ve been working on this idea in different ways for a couple of years.” First, we interviewed senior citizens on film asking their predictions for the world after they’re gone - that became Future Forecasts. That project led to another called Frequency 783. Gary: “from these different shapes we started thinking about assisted suicide – about ‘Body Autonomy’ – and we decided to get more focused on telling a story.

About a year ago they began work in Dublin via a process “that didn’t really work for us…” “This is a second chance, a lot of material didn’t make it over here…” But it always focused on some version of an “18 year old man (Neimhin) and a “woman in her 40’s (Adrienne Truscott, the other performer, who apparently was being interviewed by Sandra Bernhard that morning). “They are the two onstage playing the two onstage or playing two who talk about the two who are onstage – both narrating and being. They play instruments but are not ‘professional’ but they are being ‘a band.’”

The residency fortuitously kicked off at a book launch party for St Mark’s Is Dead by Ada Calhoun - at which former members of the Beastie Boys and Bikini Kill played together. Feidlim describes how redolent the whole event was of an 80’s “punk” scene in New York that has now been paved over. “…it brought a tone that New York could bring to this work – we are here because it is offered by BAC, an opportunity to work on this, but this also allowed us to have a taste of New York as a starting place for the work– Adrienne led us to that event and we had made our way to Adrienne (who is New York based) for what she could authentically bring… this rubbed off on us very early in this residency and seeped into the work.”

I know the piling up imperatives the day before a showing, so I ask if there is anything else they would like said before we stop?

They both say: this time has been crucial, “…very supportive but also the people at BAC just let us get on with it.” Feidlim smiles and says, “we’ll see how we feel tomorrow.

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Ain Gordon is a three-time Obie Award-winning writer/director/actor, a two-time NYFA recipient and a Guggenheim Fellow in Playwriting. Gordon’s work has been seen at BAM Next Wave, New York Theatre Workshop, Soho Rep., Public Theatre, 651 ARTS, Dance Theater Workshop, PS 122, Baryshnikov Arts Center, and HERE (all NY); Mark Taper Forum (CA), George Street Playhouse (NJ), Vermont Performance Lab, Flynn Center (VT), Krannert Center (IL), OnStage at Connecticut College, MASS MoCA, Baltimore Museum of Art (MD), DiverseWorks (TX), VSA North Fourth Arts Center (NM), Jacob’s Pillow (MA), LexArts (KY), Dance Space (DC), and others. Gordon’s Art Life & Show-Biz; A Non-Fiction Play is published in Palgrave’s “Dramaturgy Of The Real.” Gordon has collaborated with Sō Percussion at the Walker (MN), BAM Next Wave (NY), River To River (NY), Philadelphia Fringe, and more; with Bebe Miller at Wexner (OH), Helena Presents (MT), and others; with David Gordon at American Repertory Theatre (MA), American Conservatory Theater (CA) and American Music Theatre Festival (PA). Gordon was an original Off-Broadway cast member of Spalding Gray: Stories Left To Tell and toured with it to UCLA, Portland Institute for Contemporary Art (OR), ICA Boston (Elliot Norton Award nom), the Walker (MN), and New Territories (UK), and more. Gordon has been a co-Director of the Pick Up Performance Co(s) since 1992. 

Choreographed in tandem with a dramatic play of projections, now it is simply two bodies working together with the weighted fluidity of molten metal. A lunge to the side is lengthened. A subtle shoulder shrug is shortened. The movement is precise; sometimes intricate, other times expansive, but always muscular. 

Williams watches, then turns to her brother and collaborator, graphic designer Jay T Williams. He smiles and shrugs from a table littered with idle laptops and a projector rendered useless by the sunlight. He seems perfectly fine with his light design being temporarily nixed. 

“I don’t think there’s any reason we can’t do both things,” she says, and rehearsal continues with the blinds open.

This calm acceptance of multiple possibilities seems typical for the soft-spoken 37-year-old Mineko Williams. A former dancer with Hubbard Street Dance Chicago (HSDC), she is a self-professed introvert who didn’t plan on being a choreographer.

“As a dancer I wasn’t one to speak up a lot. It wasn’t my way,” she says, “I guess that’s why it surprised me to be in the front of the room and enjoying it.”

But there was never ambivalence about dancing. “Legend goes that I was bullying my mom for dance lessons when I was three,” she says, “but she made me wait until I was five.” She trained for 11 years with her mother’s teacher, Yvonne Brown Collodi at the Hinsdale Dance Academy in Illinois. After two years on scholarship at the Lou Conte Dance Studio she joined the River North Chicago Dance Company and eventually moved on to HSDC where she danced for 12 years before retiring in 2012.

In 2010 she collaborated with Terence Marling on Harold and the Purple Crayon: A Dance Adventure for Hubbard Street 2. Creating movement at first felt like a “science experiment,” she says, but after making the full length Recall for HSDC in 2012 she embraced the challenge. She has since choreographed several works for HSDC and Hubbard Street 2 and is often referred to as a rising talent in the Chicago dance scene. In 2013 she was awarded a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Choreographic Fellowship, and the following year a Princess Grace Foundation-USA Works-in-Progress Residency at BAC for the spring 2015 season.

“Movement is probably the most natural way for me to communicate,” she says. “Making dance is an extension of all that.” 

The BAC residency is Mineko Williams’ first opportunity to create something that is hers alone. She hopes it will be a full-length piece or collection of related pieces, but admits everything hinges on working with people with whom she feels an unspoken connection.

“I like the rehearsal space to be a fun place,” she says, “I think that’s when magic can happen.”

So she has chosen her residency collaborators carefully. Dancer Isaac Spencer is a dear friend and a fellow former member of Hubbard Street. He now lives in Germany so Mineko Williams was thrilled that he was available. Adrienne Lipson was part of a Hubbard Street 2 workshop and Mineko Williams took an immediate shine to her ready-for-anything attitude. As for composer Robert Haynes, he and Mineko Williams have created several pieces together and both feel a real synergy with one another.      

But Mineko Williams’ primary collaborator for her BAC residency is her brother Jay T whom she describes in an email as her “go to guy for inspiration” and “the one person who gets me…my aesthetic and my vision probably the most naturally and clearly.”

“He said he’d never seen me do anything that represented me,” she says, “it turned a light on in me to do more, to explore more.”

Mineko Williams says her brother’s job with the marketing firm Fision doesn’t allow him time to experiment and make what he describes as “real art.”  That meant a learning curve for both of them. “He was quick to scrap ideas,” she says,  “whereas in our process, finding, sculpting and discovering what works as we keep delving into the process is more the norm.”

By day ten the blinds are back down. Invited guests stand and watch a time-lapse video of the rehearsal process as it flickers by on the front of Jay T’s shirt. Haynes’ brooding pulsating score fills the room and the dancers insinuate themselves amongst the onlookers.  They move in a fluid duet echoed by ghostly projections.  A grainy home movie of Lipson as a baby fills the back wall. Spencer and the grown Lipson mimic with a floppy, real time duet. Then it is just Lipson. She is still, captured like a reluctant specimen under a beam of refracted light. Her movements are small and subtle, but bursts with carefully restrained vigor. The showing ends as casually as it began, but Mineko Williams and her brother look relaxed and happy.  The segments are ideas – sparks of ideas – that Mineko Williams will take back to Chicago and blow into the full flame of her first independent effort. 

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Lisa Rinehart is a former dancer with American Ballet Theatre. She is a freelance writer and video journalist covering the arts, culture and social issues for a wide range of online and print publications.

In Gravel’s newest work, Bains Publics, she wants to engage differently with her audience. Her starting point—the concept of a public bath—provides a model for a shared experience without a clearly defined spectator. I was surprised to realize that the aggressive hold Gravel exerted over her audience in Ma mère est un mâle alpha is the very sense of control that she is currently questioning.

We discussed this shift in a recent studio visit and Gravel pointed out that part of this new point of inquiry is around the notion of constraint. Gravel’s movement vocabulary often employs a physical manifestation of constraint: there is a sense of pressure exerted from within her body that must contend with the space outside. In her research for Bains Publics, Gravel told me that she is interested in contending with the constraints of a theater: “How can the public feel free?” she wondered aloud to me.

For a recent studio showing in Studio 4B, Gravel positioned the audience in single chairs scattered throughout the studio with different facings. I was aware of my focus shifting between Gravel and her fellow performer, Laurence Dufour. My other choice as an audience member was to gaze at the mirrored wall where I could see both of the performers, my fellow audience, and myself. I had other choices available to me, of course, that I didn’t take: I could have scooted my chair around, for instance, or walked to a new chair, or left the studio altogether. I began to wonder if what Gravel is most interested in is the choices that we don’t make—the invisible constraints constantly acting on all of us.

One of the first things Gravel told me when I visited her studio was that she looks for authenticity in a dancer’s body. Or, as she explained to me, she doesn’t want to see a dancer moving excitedly, she wants to see excitement. Perhaps in Bains Publics, Gravel is demanding the same standards of her audience. She doesn’t want her audience to perform being present, she wants her audience to be present.

The question is how do you exact that presence from an audience? In a public bath, the heat of the sauna causes the core body temperature to rise, dilating the blood vessels and increasing blood flow to the skin’s surface. I’m not sure what the equivalent experience looks like for an audience but I have no doubt that Gravel will find out. 

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Lydia Bell is a cultural producer and arts administrator. She is currently Director of Programming at Artis in New York where she oversees artist commissions, public programs, exhibitions, and the Artis Grant Program. Prior to joining Artis in 2014, Lydia was Development and Curatorial Associate at Danspace Project. Lydia has also worked on projects with Eiko & Koma, Sam Miller/OAM Company, and Movement Research and spoken on national and international panels on the subject of interdisciplinary performance. She is a graduate of the Institute for Curatorial Practice in Performance at Wesleyan University.

New York–based artist Maya Ciarrocchi has created videos and projection design for Merce Cunningham, Ping Chong, Bebe Miller, and Donna Uchizono, among others, as well as for regional theaters around the country. Most recently, she designed the video projections for Carmen de Lavallade ‘s one-woman show, “As I Remember It” at Baryshnikov Arts Center.

Ciarrocchi’s video installations and single-channel works feature interviews, life-sized durational portraits, and environmental documentation; they invite viewers to contemplate assumptions about communities, individuals, and how identity is constructed. Her subjects have included coal-mining communities in West Virginia (“Overburden”), former ultra-Orthodox Jews who have left their religion (“Frei”), and, the New York dance and performance community in “I’m Nobody, Who Are You?”

She first experimented with video portraiture working on “Necessary Beauty” with Bebe Miller. Prerecorded portraits of the performers were paired and then played in conjunction with voice-over text that didn’t necessarily match the individual portrait.

 Ciarrocchi found when shooting these portraits over the course of just a minute, the subjects would subtly shift their emotional response. The more vulnerable they became in front of the camera, the more viewers could begin to create a narrative. She connects this to her background in dance, and how looking at bodies moving in space creates narratives. There is a design aspect—the shapes the bodies are forming in negative and positive space and were the intersections are—and then there’s how each individual dancer embodies the same space.

 For her durational portraiture, she shoots her subjects for 10 minutes, ample time to deal with the comfort / discomfort of having to look at the camera lens directly throughout. Rather then asking her subjects to stare at the camera, she asks them to consider their future viewer.

 In “Gender/Power (composition II),” which Ciarrocchi developed in residency at BAC along with collaborator Kris Grey, a video installation featuring three side-by-side durational portraits precedes the entrance of the performing bodies; they appear to inhabit the same space, unaware of each other. The performance also utilizes a combination of full body video portraiture and a distillation of close-up and re-framings, postural and gestural aspects of gender performance condensed or extracted into performative actions.

 While in residency at BAC, as the team began braiding the text, they returned to an original concept of the work, about transposition—of stories, bodies, and image. Ciarrocchi began to layer the portraits she had shot in a variety of ways so that parts of the image could be seem through other parts, and as subjects move, the image completely shifts. The visuals reflect and offer an unpacking of what’s being said in the text.

 Both Grey and Ciarrocchi are interested in revealing how particular ideologies are lived, performed, or transcribed onto the body. “Gender/Power” examines the subject of gender and authority by making visible the personal narratives of performers who have made specific decisions to disrupt or subvert gender signifiers. At its core, “Gender/Power” is about how we make snap judgments about people because we don’t really take the time to actually look at them, beyond skin deep.

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Brian McCormick’s training in performing and video arts brought him to the School of Media Studies at The New School (TNS) where he earned his MA in 1996 and joined the faculty in 1997. Around the same time, he began working with Nicholas Leichter, whose dance company he managed for 15 years. In addition to teaching media design, Brian developed and currently teaches a seminar on media and performance, and a production course on social media design & management. For over 20 years, he has been working with young people, producing a ‘zine with homeless teens, leading a creative writing and performance meet-up with LGBT poets, and collaborating with the nationally recognized Teen Reviewers and Critics (TRaC) program—for which he has taught arts criticism for over ten years, and developed a media-based workshop in partnership with SONY Wonder Technology Lab. Since 2012, he has led the BAC After School Critical Response program at Baryshnikov Arts Center. He is currently researching how performing arts organizations are using social media for arts marketing and engagement.