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(DANCE REVIEW) STAU dance startles
1.26.06
STAU
Concept and Choreography by Anouk van Dijk
Performed at MASS MoCA
Friday, Jan 20, 2006 and Saturday, Jan 21, 2006
On paper beforehand it sounded incredibly goofy and like some bad “happening” out of the 1960s. And on the way into the Hunter Center at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Mass., last Saturday night, it seemed even less promising when ushers insisted we shed our outer layers (our coats, sweaters, jackets) and leave our shoes out in the hallway. Were we in for some ridiculous, touchy-feely, getting-in-touch-with-our-feelings-type fascist interventionism disguised as art? Were we going to be humiliated in the name of breaking down the third wall of theater—which in case you’ve never noticed, is there for a very good reason (barriers, as we’ve seen throughout the world and especially in recent years, can make for peaceful relations, or, as Robert Frost put it, good fences make good neighbors)?
I gritted my teeth, hung up my coat in the basement cloakroom, shed my boots (luckily the socks I was wearing weren’t one of the pairs with holes in the big toe), and made my way into the Hunter Center, where a small square of a stage was surrounded by squared-off rows of chairs – only three or four rows on each side, for a total of under 150 seats in a room that could probably fit nearly 10 times that many. This was clearly, for better or worse, going to be an evening of intimate dance-theater, so we did make sure we sat three rows back, just in case whatever took place on stage was going to spill over into the laps of those unfortunates sitting in the front rows.
Which indeed it did. And fortunate as we were not to participate in that unnecessary, unwanted moment in the spotlight, in the end, it was also fortunate that we were there to witness this spectacular performance that defied all the clichés I’ve painted here, breaking through the silliness and vapidity of lesser efforts in this genre.
And how did Anouk van Dijk’s dancers pull this off? Mostly through spectacular focus, concentrated effort, and sheer virtuosity. These dancers worked hard, and long, establishing their relationship to their space – and the audience – through demanding, acrobatic movements, with lots of horizontal swoops and gravity-defying lifts. They rolled, crawled under risers, pushed themselves to the point of exhaustion, and bared their vulnerability in an incredibly intimate environment. It didn’t hurt that they were nice to look at—clothed or unclothed, as one occasionally was—either. But their version of those eternal questions--Where does the stage begin and end? What is the role of an audience member in a performance? How do audience members effect or change a performance?—was provocative, challenging, fun.
The intensity and fun was blown wide open midway through the evening when the risers, seats, and stage were removed and the entire Hunter Center became an amorphous stage, and the audience mixed with dancers. The feeling of uncertainty, of never knowing where the next performance was going to begin, or if the person standing next to you was a plant or a dancer, was invigorating. Dancers were seemingly thrown up against the walls of the room, only to reappear in the midst of the crowd, sometimes sharing a spotlight with an unsuspecting audience member (including yours truly, who was fixed in stone for what seemed like an eternity, but was probably only a minute, with the hot-chick dancer, the two of us alone in a spotlight as she writhed in front and around me and then whispered something to me in English that I promised I would never repeat to anyone…Lucky me!).
Obviously much of this second part had to have been improvisational, in that the dancers could not have predicted exactly how the audience would respond (indeed, one clever draftee broke up a crowd of dancers by throwing his hands in the air, and they all responded by falling down on cue. Come to think of it, maybe that was scripted?). Given that, plus the technical demands – the lighting and sound – this was really a spectacular show, choreographed with startling precision, evocative more of Tiananmen Square and the Berlin Wall than Altamont or Woodstock, yet somehow able to achieve this without making the crowd feel manipulated, even though we obviously were.
What a fun night at the dance theater. What a fun night at MASS MoCA.
--Seth Rogovoy
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