"voix de ville"
Cori Olinghouse
Danspace Project
New York, NY
February 3, 2011
By Martha Sherman
Copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
An evening of opposites, the two acts of “voix de ville” pair a gentle landscape of American dance nostalgia with two jolting slaps of jagged individuality. This performance was the opening of Danspace’s multi-part PLATFORM 2011: Body Madness. Judy Hussie-Taylor, the curator of Part 1 of PLATFORM, entitles it Absurdity & Wit. The first of four programs with this theme, Cori Olinghouse paired a first act of her own gentle ensemble piece, “The Animal Suite: Experiments in Vaudeville and Shapeshifting” with a surprising pair of performances, one by Kota Yamazaki and the second by the voguing duo, Archie Burnett and Javier Ninja.
There was less of the absurd, and more of the nostalgic in Olinghouse’s opening work, which wended through Buster Keaton territory, evoked a bit of Shakespeare, and made a village out of her fine quintet of performers. The second act offered wit in its dizzying physicality, through dance that challenged our eyes to move as quickly as the limbs of the performers.
“The Animal Suite” opened with a simple solo by Mina Nishimura. The center stage was littered with the accoutrements of vaudeville, a straw hat, cane, blue jacket. Nishimura wandered into it wearing oversized shorts and shirt, with an innocent pageboy and unblinking eyes, dragging her toes. She awkwardly tried out the cane and hat on stage. Kai Kleinbard joined her, also in an oversized suit and porkpie, and stuffed Nishimura into a vest and pants, creating the bare beginnings of a vaudeville act.
After Nishimura and Kleinbard set the scene, Olinghouse and Eva Schmidt, in high-waisted pants and suspenders, moved onstage to do a classic softshoe. Using three long tree limbs on stage, they fashioned a mini-proscenium stage, and danced a duet of close, quick steps. Around them, Kleinbard partnering Neal Beasley, became a looser and goofier pair of vaudevillians than the serious Olinghouse and Schmidt. As the women kicked tightly, the men rolled their knees and calves in the scarecrow move from Wizard of Oz. Both pairs morphed into slippery movement with hands and feet that seem pushed by invisible forces.
As promised in her title, Olinghouse played with more than vaudeville, In one whimsical—and more sexual-- scene, Kleinbard donned a bear’s head to dance with Olinghouse, who eyed the audience and sashayed with her bear in references to both A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and later – with two other dancers donning bears’ heads – a bit of Goldilocks. Later, a bear pair became a bird pair, heads bobbing and shoulder blades quivering. With each image, the dance expanded beyond its own steps to catch our imaginations, but did not seek particular ending to the stories. The narrative was a puzzle being unwound and remade; there was no resolution to shapeshifting – just continually emerging images.
The powerful sense of place and history that Olinghouse projected depended also on her spare use of costumes and props, and especially with her use of this stage. A complex puzzle of a performing space, few choreographers manage to use everything that St. Marks’ offers -- the expanse of floor space, the framing stairs (that also serve as some of the audience seating), and the architectural niche of altar at the north end of the stage, built-in columns and a tiny platform altar. Olinghouse used it all, enhanced by the tree limbs, a Beckett-inspired piece of stagecraft. In addition to becoming the proscenium vaudeville space, the trees also reminded us of the barren landscape of Beckett's clowns, waiting. The soundtrack was a hazy scratch of radio static, occasionally broken by a tinny tune, evoking something just beyond aural reach.
In that same landscape of scattered tree limbs and littered vaudeville paraphernalia, the second half of the program danced to a very different radio beat. Yamazaki opened with his solo, “Itsuko san.” His costume, a layered red dress, was the first of many direct contrasts to the soft neutrality of the first half of the program. Yamazaki’s gender-bending, more-than-double-jointed undulation was a bridge to “Elements of Vogue,” created and performed by one of the godfathers of voguing, Archie Burnett, and Javier Ninja, a direct disciple of Benny and the House of Ninja whose movement bristled with energy.
With rigid, quick hand and wrist moves in a tightly bound space, Javier Ninja, in black and metal, exploded from his perch on a red stool. Without moving the other 80% of his body, his arms, hands, neck and head wildly spun through increasingly complex patterns. Ninja was introduced and followed by Burnett, a classic freestyle performer for over thirty years, who used more of his body as well as arms. His movement, including an audiacious split, was like one big wink at the audience, and gave the evening an edge.
“Animal Suite” and “Elements of Vogue” were not two segments of an obvious whole. They ended up creating a performance that was less Absurd & Witty than it was sweet and tangy. It wasn’t on the menu, but it was still tasty.
copyright © 2010 by Martha Sherman
Photo by Bill Herbert (BH Photos): Cori Olinghouse, Eva Schmidt in “The Animal Suite: Experiments in Vaudeville and Shapeshifting”