“The Materiality of Impermanence”
Kimberly Bartosik / daela
Dance Theater Workshop
New York
February 3, 2010
by Kathleen O’Connell
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Kimberly Bartosik’s new hour-long work, “The Materiality of Impermanence,” made a fuss over the mechanics of theater usually hidden from our view: working the lights, producing the sound, getting in and out of costume. It fussed with conceptual matters, too: the nature of “performing,” the delineation of performance space, real time vs. performance time, and yes, the fourth wall. But for all the work’s worrying over matters theatrical, it wasn’t compelling theater. There was too much navel-gazing and too little dancing. Bartosik took her eye off of the eloquent resonance of the human body moving in space—and lost her voice.
The work meandered to a start while the audience was filing into the theater. Roderick Murray (lighting design) and Luke Fasano (music) sat onstage pretending to drink beer and play Scrabble. Marc Mann, dressed in street clothes and a dark hoodie, stood at the rear with his back to us. Murray and Fasano folded up their game and wandered off; Mann walked forward to a lone mike suspended from the stage right ceiling and set it in motion with a big, swinging push. It whooshed against the air, the house went dark, and we heard Bartosik’s disembodied voice over the sound system: “I wish I could just write a song,” she sighed, “I have all these lines.” She emerged into view walking slowly backwards down the steep steps of the auditorium’s right aisle while reading increasingly disjointed text aloud from a sheaf of paper held in front of her by Fasano; Murray followed along, audibly murmuring lighting cues into his headset. The proceedings were underway in earnest, but it would be a long time before anything happened.
Billed as a site-specific work, “The Materiality of Impermanence” was designed to expand the performance space, break it up into discrete environments, and fragment the audience’s perspective. A row of chairs had been set up along the front and sides of DTW’s curious, sunken, maybe-there’s-a-proscenium-maybe-there-isn’t stage. The audience was invited to either sit there or in the steeply raked auditorium, the last three rows of which had been roped off to move us forward into the theater. There was no set: strips of LED lighting had been laid down on the stage floor to mark out the rooms, doorways, and corridors of a modest house in which some—but not all—of the dancing took place. The performers—who included members of the production crew—entered and exited via the auditorium’s two aisles, their progress as much a part of the action as anything on the stage.
What the performance looked and felt like depended on where one sat. That might have been as interesting for the audience as it was for Bartosik had the piece been a third as long and seen in succession from three different vantage points. As it was, the seating arrangement only told us that Bartosik was thinking about space—it didn’t tell us what she was thinking about space. This set the pattern for the evening: time and again Bartosik was at pains to indicate she was thinking about something by staging emblems of her ruminations, but the work only came to life when she stopped thinking out loud and put bodies in motion.
The work was littered with episodes meant to demonstrate that performance is an artifact. Once Bartosik reached the stage, she and Mann slowly stripped down to their underwear, then painstakingly re-dressed themselves in costumes (by Glen Rumsey) only marginally different from the street clothes and hoodies they’d entered in. When it was time for some music (which wasn’t often), Fasano held an iPod up to the mike and hit “PLAY.” During an interlude between bouts of dancing, Bartosik tore off bits of her script and put them in Mann’s mouth: Was she feeding him his lines or making him eat his words? These episodes were delivered with too much innocence to seem like gimmicks, but that didn’t make them resonant, interesting, or witty: versions of this schtick have already been done to death in little black box theaters the world over.
There were scattered episodes of potent dance but they happened only when Bartosik stopped playing games, moved to the center of the stage, and began to exploit the set’s narrative and movement potential—as well as her own beautiful, sparrow-boned gravity—without Murray and Fasano in tow. Bartosik and Mann never violated the constraints imposed by the imaginary walls once they began to dance inside of it; their movement was shaped by the tight confines of the floor plan, which told us plenty about the relationship between space, bodies, and motion. Nor were words necessary: put two people in motion in even the merest suggestion of a house, and there’s already plenty of drama.
Much of the dancing wasn’t lovely to look at. Bartosik and Mann flung themselves around with the clumsy virtuosity and stumbling, uncertain rhythm of punch-drunk martial artists unable to get a fix on their adversaries. As they grappled in one of its tiny rooms, Mann struggled with what looked like equal parts care and cruelty to keep a writhing Bartosik from collapsing into a heap on the floor. There were moments of pure grace: Bartosik stood in one of the rooms, slowly shifting her weight from front foot to back, fists lightly clenched at her waist. She looked like Boccioni’s “Unique Form of Continuity in Space" come to life—a neat trick given that she was barely moving. “We need this power” a voice said, and she launched into a series of slow, sweeping lunges and pivots.
The work closed with an extended solo for Joanne Kotze to a plaintive song sung from the stage by Fasano. Dressed in a spangly romper and dark, glamour-girl bob—and freed from the tyranny of the floor plan—Kotze stalked around the stage in leggy, creaturely splendor. With her arms stretched behind her at a low, winged angle, she was equal parts fashion model, stork, and swan queen. It felt tacked on, but was fun to see.
Too much of “The Materiality of Impermanence” was padded with interminable found movement—folding and refolding discarded garments, taking shoes off, putting them back on again—that had little to do with the potent kernels of movement and drama immanent in the floor plan. Murray’s lighting design and Fasano’s music created an austere but resonant performing environment; their presence on stage added nothing to it. Bartosik’s generosity towards her collaborators and their art—her evident desire to make them a part of the show—is admirable. But “The Materiality of Impermanence” isn’t a light show or a concert: on her stage and in her show, Bartosik’s art must be first among equals.
copyright © 2009 by Kathleen O’Connell
Photos by Yi-Chun Wu
Top: Kimberly Bartosik and Marc Mann in "The Materiality of Impermanence"
Bottom: Luke Fasano and Joanne Kotze in "The Materiality of Impermanence"
