“Big Eater”
David Neumann
The Kitchen
New York, NY
March 7, 2010
By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Neumann’s mix of the sublime and ridiculous weave through each element of the work, most successfully in the marvelously mismatched cast of dancers who enlivened and co-created the piece. I can’t keep my eyes off Neal Medlyn. It’s not only because of his trademark nerdy look: the dark-framed glasses and long, stringy hair paired with a most unlikely dancing body – gangly legs and concave chest. It wasn’t even the eye-catching costume of sparkly leggings and a fur vest that so suited him. He mesmerized because his personality and presence demand it; his glare insisted on being met. Neumann’s other male dancers included another of his long-time collaborators, Andrew Dinwiddie, and the classically muscled and beautiful Will Rawls. Medlyn was partnered with Dinwiddie (another arresting performance artist in an unlikely body) in both the opening and the central Hasselhoff scene; together, they were both hilarious and pathetic. When Medlyn was paired with Rawls, their equally long limbs were another match: Rawls all muscle and clarity; Medlyn, a tangle of long skinny limbs and antic energy.
The women made up a second isosceles triangle of dancers. Small, lithe, and well-paired, Natalie Agee and Weena Pauly danced close duets including creditable pirouettes and arabesques in the forest scenes. They also spun off to become characters including the interviewer, the videographer, and the scolding daughter. Tall, lithe Kennis Hawkins joined them in the female trios, but had more impact as a partner to Rawls in several balletic scenes. Their training and discipline allowed them to move between the classical and contemporary steps with simple elegance. In the most exuberant segment, the entire cast galloped around the stage, Medlyn’s legs crooked in tilted leaps, and each of the others in their own joyous bounding steps.
The dancers had a lot to do; it was busy on the stage. A long dangling tree of folding chairs hung from ceiling to floor upstage right, and the dancers spent a lot of time carrying, opening and closing other folding chairs (particularly Dinwiddie, who carried chairs as his signature.) For an ongoing panel discussion about the ten ways the world was most likely to end, tables were set up and taken down; a video camera came out to film and project onto the active television monitor. And there was a good deal of (big) eating, especially in the duet in which Medlyn and Dinwiddie both played Hasselhoff in his degradation – each splayed on the floor, chomping on parallel sloppy burgers and mumbling in response to their offstage daughter’s scolding.
Woven throughout, haunting video imagery was projected both on the back screen and on an old tube TV set onstage. A small square mirror in the center of the large screen reflected back on us and left a hole in the images of forests and projected dancers, as if nothing were quite complete. The narrator of the film that periodically flickered (‘the man in the woods’ on the small TV screen) was Frederick Neumann, the choreographer’s father and a former member of Mabou Mines. His deep soft voice emerged from a video forest scene to tell us of awakening in the morning and finding that “everything was gone. I was empty.” In the midst of all of the evening’s excess, we shared that feeling. But Neumann and his merry band did serve up quite a feast.
copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Photo: Neal Medlyn, Andrew Dinwiddie, Weena Pauly in “Big Eater” by Paul Kolnik
