is the word 'diary' better than the word 'blog'? probably not.
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Repetition Dance.
Last night I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music to watch the Batsheva dance troupe perform Max. It was OK. Parts of it were definitely worth seeing and made the overall performance worthwhile, but there were some long stretches where I was not only bored but felt compelled to roll my eyes as well. There was just a bit too much attention drawn to the look-how-we-are-deconstructing-your-ideas-about-movement style of the troupe.
However, the three ladies sitting near me who kept giggling? To them I say: Man, just grow up already! Have you not noticed that you are IN YOUR 40s? Or, ladies, here's another suggestion: If you can't pipe down during a performance largely without music (and so SILENT, you know?), then just stay at the bar at which you are most certainly a fixture and order three more cosmos, OK? Fuck.
It's not that I couldn't understand the giggling on some level (remember, the eye rolling?). It's just that it happened for a large portion of the entire performance, by which I mean, for way too long, and seemingly without any self-consciousness about how everyone around them kept glaring at them with murder-eyes. Who, really, can't read a bunch of New York murder eyes and shut up?
Cool things from the performance: An extended piece where each of the ten members were connected to a different percussion track and moved only to that, slowly evolving into an ending where they all moved together. And another extended piece that relied only on counting to ten (in Hebrew) paired with 10-part movements that would repeat, slowly building from one to 10 (an interesting study in difference and repetition).
But, well, when it comes to deconstructing dance, I prefer Edouard Lock's LaLaLa Human Steps troupe. I've seen a number of their performances live, but I also admire Lock's film Amelia, which is a dance he conceived and directed for film, such that he takes advantage of the angles of shooting rather than relying on the static view from a theater onto a stage. It's pretty brilliant.
A few months ago I saw Lock's Amjad at BAM. The performance is 1 hour and 45 minutes long without an intermission (everyone sees movies that long without complaining, but it's somehow harder to see a dance performance that long without a break). During the first hour I was interested but also mildly alarmed that I would be stuck there for almost 2 hours (partly because of the amazingly small amount of leg room they give you in the beautiful BAM theater--and I'm not very tall!). However, the last 45 minutes made it all worthwhile... and to a certain extent relied on routines built up in the first hour. So, fair enough. One hour and 45 minutes.
2:17 p.m. - March 06, 2009
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