“Arena”
Walter Dundervill
JACK
Brooklyn, NY
July 17, 2014
by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman
Photo ©Ian Douglas
Walter Dundervill in “Arena”
Walter Dundervill in “Arena”
If you’re going to drop in on anyone, make it Walter Dundervill. He brings a brilliant and bizarre sensibility to everything he touches, as a set designer, costumer, performer, choreographer, and director. “Arena,” his latest performance work, was shown at JACK, the new performance venue in Clinton Hill. “Arena,” is a visual and movement exploration offered in three-hour increments with a changing roster of top-notch contemporary dancers (sometimes including himself.) Audience members were invited to come and go at will. Many, including me, arrived later than the performance start time; no one left early.
Dundervill, a Bessie-award winning costume and visual designer, has been a fixture in the contemporary dance and performance world for many years. He writes that this work is intended to evoke, among many arenas: time travel, historical narrative, ritual – and the molecular structures of a mushroom colony. One of the media that Dundervill has played with over several years happens also to be silver foil; it was that connection that first drew curator Stacy Grossfield to invite this work to JACK.
“Arena” was a constantly morphing landscape of fabric, ribbon, mirrors, and color panels that Dundervill actively guided, created, and destroyed through the bodies and movements of the dancers – in order to guide and build again.
JACK is a simple open space with flexible seating. Its most striking feature is the wall covering – all crumpled aluminum foil. Two rows of box seating was reminiscent of the old PS122; for “Arena,” groupings of folding chairs were arrayed on the other three sides of the stage, and people moved among the seats at will for new vantage points. Often, they moved to be out of the glare of spotlights in every direction, reflected in mirrors that Dundervil placed and moved as well as in all the silver that lined the room.
When I joined the audience, Dundervill was pulling a thin gray fabric covering over the open performance space among the chairs. After fully unfurling and smoothing it, he began to criss-cross the plain background with richly colored thick ribbon. As he unspooled each with a graceful flick of his wrist, they became elegant patterns, crossed or diagonal. The one or two times when a recalcitrant ribbon buckled somewhere along the perfect straight lines, Dundervill tamed it with a light twitch. Surrounding the space were large mirror fragments and transparent colored panels, which he moved to change the architecture of the space.
The performers were decorative, too, and he used them (and himself) as another palette, furling and unfurling cloth and ribbon around the bodies. Standing at one edge of the stage was a half-hidden female dancer (on this night, Rebecca Brooks) who held a large yellow drum over her face, and was swathed in a mix of textured fabrics. On the other side of the floor were three dancers (Nicole Daunic, Jennifer Kjos, and Kevin Lovelady) lounging together in a huddle on the ground.
Sometimes the dancers were pulled into motion with trailing tails of fabric. Sometimes Dundervill used a magician’s trick of misdirection. As he drew our eyes by a flick of mirrors or colors at one side, everything was changing on the other side. A dancer who was tied into layers of cloth was now naked under a simple tied cape, or those who had bunched in a corner had disappeared entirely (behind a screen, as it turned out.) As if from the air, Dundervill built a plexiglass bier for Daunic, who laid on it in a gorgeous yellow and silver draped covering, like Aurora in “The Sleeping Beauty.” A new mysterious image had been summoned from the detritus of the last, equally compelling one.
It was a shame to miss the first hour of the performance. In overheard conversations after the audience raggedly dispersed, one viewer talked about the old English costumes with bustles and headdresses – not a glimpse of that was evident in the latter half of the show. The closing scene, though, offered another time traveling fragment, evoking both ancient history and spacesuits.
In the silver-papered theater space, Dundervill’s use of tin foil as a costuming device was like coming home. As the dancers moved into different sculptural body postures, the master simply wrapped them, limb by limb, in silver. After the intrigue of the other scenes, this one got a little monotonous and predictable by the end. But by the time the fourth dancer had been covered, we were satisfied witnesses to King Midas in a new medium – everything Dundervill had touched now glittered, and we sat in a gallery of frozen silver galactic sculptures.
copyright © 2014 by Martha Sherman