“Arena”
Walter Dundervill
JACK
Brooklyn, NY
July 31, 2015
by Leigh Witchel
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel
For Walter Dundervill, getting there is all the fun. A Bessie winner, Dundervill has been a fixture in contem-porary New York dance for more than a decade. Also an artist and designer, Dundervill is fascinated with tasks and preparation. He’s dealt with this before: “Aesthetic Destiny 1: Candy Mountain,” done at Dance Theater Workshop in 2011, involved an endless setup of cardboard cutouts, only to have them all removed the moment the actual performance began. In “Arena,” an encore installation from last year, that became the show. (Click this link to read Martha Sherman’s report of last year’s performances).
“Arena” (photo of the 2014 production © Maria Baranova)
Dundervill, a wiry man with a shaved head and salt and pepper stubble, was busy tying robes or bewigging his artists as we entered. Everything was auteur: he designed the evening, styled it, provided the movement, was the DJ, all with the determined concentration of a plate-spinning act.
Seven other dancers were involved, mainly arranging and grouping in what seemed like loosely structured improvisation. About an hour in, some started slowly oscillating their arms, pointing them from side to side overhead like traffic controllers.
Three main transitions formed a mental division for the audience: from cream muslin to colored chiffon to black and silver foil.
The first section, all in muslin and gray wigs, felt as if one of Gainsborough’s powdered ladies paid a call to your aunt’s den in New Rochelle for tea: Robes and skirts, like castoffs from a toybox, were piled at the space’s perimeter and dumped unceremoniously when shucked. Luxe heeled shoes were approximated by wearing white stockings outside of character heels or thrift store cast-offs. Everything was mad, happy chaos: Peewee’s Playhouse visits the Petit Trianon. The references were mostly haute 18th century, but then Dundervill tied Niall Jones’ wrap high up on his chest like a traditional Korean robe.
The second section involved Plexiglas boxes and a neon drop that Dundervill methodically cross-hatched ribbons over. After being covered, dancers and all, with gray gauze, that scene was exchanged for black garments, with Dundervill emerging with roll after roll of aluminum foil to wrap the dancers’ legs, arms or heads. Crumpling foil chains across the space, he proved what fun (or art) you can make with ordinary items from your kitchen.
Even when they weren’t dancing, the cast had a knack for the arresting. The aptly-named Athena Malloy seemed to always wind up in a pose evoking beauty through serene wisdom. And there were other moods. Kevin Lovelady lay on the floor totally obscured in cream colored flannel, with a hood tied with an orange ribbon round his face. Later, Dundervill exchanged the orange ribbon for a pink one.
As the performance went on the dancers got less tractable in their somnambulism, ignoring Dundervill and continuing to move past him as he tried to dress them. Jennifer Kjos lay on top of Lovelady, who was now clad only in frayed black skivvies. (Didn’t his mother ever tell him to wear decent underwear?) Dundervill unceremoniously pulled her off and changed her outfit. At another point he almost got caught in a mass of bodies writing on the floor: when you weren’t looking, several of the dancers had moved into a baroque pile in slumber, or perhaps catastrophe.
The DJ soundtrack was a collage from Saint-Saëns to Led Zeppelin and Sylvester to “Swan Lake,” which segued aptly into Diana Ross lamenting “My World is Empty Without You.”
Dundervill billed this as an installation where we could come and go as we pleased, but most people at this showing stuck it out for the full three-plus hours. There was a benefit to treating “Arena” as a performance. The piece would have been less interesting missing the beginning transformation from pastoral into chaos. Yet there was a reason he suggested a looser viewing. The show sagged slightly in the middle. It was a long, hot slog as the room got more crowded, the foil conserved heat, and the fans did less work.
It’s tempting to force the timeline of a performance on an installation. When Dundervill exchanged the colored chiffon drapes for black ones and the dancers stood impassive sentinel like statues at Easter Island, you mentally prepared for a finale that not only was half an hour away, but never really came. The ending happened after Roxy Music’s “Mother of Pearl,” when the dancers, their various body parts wrapped in foil that stubbornly refused to stick in place, slowly shuffled offstage.
Dundervill wasn’t interested in the usual demarcations of a performance. He was adjusting garments when we entered; he was folding things and putting them away when the audience decided the show required an ending and applauded him. Yet, even in the doldrums, there always something to see.
“Arena” looked like preparation for an event to come, but the preparation – and the metamorphosis that was its product – was the event. From look to look, persona to persona, sometimes linear, sometimes backtracking, “Arena” had no destination. Like life, there was only the journey.
© 2015 by Leigh Witchel