Ririe-Woodbury Dance: Equilibrium

Salt Lake City’s Ririe-Woodbury Dance Company opened it’s 2009/2010 season with Equilibrium, a collection of pieces which ran at the Jeanne Wagner Theater from September 24th – 26th.   If the rest of the season rises to the caliber of the performances I saw at the Saturday night performance, this will be an exciting season.

 The first dance of the evening, “It’s Gonna Get Loud,” was choreographed by Karole Armitage, a New York choreographer recently regaled by Vanity Fair magazine with the title "punk ballerina," and nominated for a 2009 Tony Award.   In a gesture akin to those associated with the minimalist sculpture of Tony Smith and Carl Andre, “Loud” began with an utterly bare dance space, the lack of set and scrim revealing stage as literal black cement box.  The sounding of a lone electric guitar, that of 80s No-Wave composer Rhys Chatham, occupied this vacancy.  But it did little to add anything by way of depth or texture.  Rather, the aluminoid drone of a Telecaster— for the length of the entire piece Chatham relentlessly played a single open string—served to reinforce a mood of cool impersonality, one which owed not a little to the indifferent attitude affected by Andy Warhol and The Velvet Underground. 

The entrance of dancers onto the stage served to reinforce this initial effect. Individual dancers, clad in professional black and gray, ran and spun energetically.  But all sense of expressivity was mediated and muted by the other members of the corps.  These bodies stood looking on from what on a conventionally dressed stage would have been the wings.  From that vantage, these watchers evinced a sense of detached subjective remove.  Through this simple means, the featured dancer— a role, or place, through which a series of highly skilled bodies passed— was objectified, converted into a kind of visual statistic, a quotient of vectors.  In a word, each dancer, like the individual worker which Karl Marx called an abstract unit of labor, became a quantifiable unit of dance.

This ironic fascination with alienated labor, to say nothing of the jerky motions Armitage had choreographed for the stage, could only recall the work of Chatham’s contemporary, artist Robert Longo.  In a famous series of monumental pencil drawings named “Men In The Cities,” Longo depicted an array of isolated figures captured in various states of radical disequilibrium.  Clad in what might have been either business-class or lounge-lizard attire, these bodies stood frozen, captured in a flash, in postures of intense ambiguity.   Were they dancing frantically or reeling from the impact of urban sniper fire?  It was hard to tell.  But this much was certain: these bodies, male and female, suspended in mid lurch, were simultaneously captured, or shot, by the camera’s indifferent eye.  Meaning suspended, the human body—in real life Longo had destabilized his models by jerking them abruptly with a wire—became a mere projectile in rationalized space.  Here was dance, not as expression but impulsion, compulsory metrosexuality, the capitalist imperative to Win!  

This much now clear, it became possible to consider the stage design anew.  Black-box now signified not simply bare-bones production, but rather the new-brutalist landscape of New York: an inter-district zone poised between Soho and Wall Street.  What Armitage’s choreography captured and turned into a readable aesthetic, or perhaps anti-aesthetic, was not so much the spirit as the patterned energy of unregulated capitalism, a snyper-reality in which Adam Smith’s self-interested homo economicus has transformed into an abstraction devoid of all inner motives or feeling – just as the dynamic singularity of painterly action in Jackson Pollock eventually gave way to the compulsive repetitions churned out by Andy Warhol and Sol LeWitt.  Armitage, a designer or broker of human movement, has identified trends, not so much meaningful as simply interesting, emerging in the general rat race.  And these she had translated into postmodern choreography—dance against the clock, at the clang of the bell.  Vanity Fair be damned, this was post-punk marionette theater.

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