“Score for a Lecture”
The Bureau for the Future of Choreography
American Realness Festival
Abrons Arts
New York, NY
January 15, 2016
by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman
In the American Realness Festival, the building itself is often an essential element of the works, not just the particular theater, but corridors, courtyards, and stairwells. The greetings among audience members, and the conversations before and after each show in the in-between spaces also suggest that many viewers are members of the downtown dance and performance community (or presenters, seeing work as part of APAP, the Association of Performing Arts Presenters, in New York for its annual bash.) It can be a hard world to enter as an audience member if you don’t already belong – and that’s an issue that artists must grapple with, if they want their work seen and experienced. The Bureau for the Future of Choreography has taken matters into its own hands, and made the building of community the central object of its art.
Photo: Audience and presenters in “Score for a Lecture.” Photo ©Ian Douglas.
The distributed program for “Score for a Lecture” was a dense map of the four levels of Abrons Arts Center. The audience members traversed a bright orange line throughout the building, angling back and forth through each corridor and staircase of the labyrinthine center. The journey included a fun, kind of silly, extensive game of “Whisper down the lane,” where the whispered phrases were all part of a sophisticated set of messages about dance as an art form.
In “Score for a Lecture,” the Bureau for the Future of Choreography included a “message initiator,” “message receiver,” and two “witnesses” along with the stage manager and technical crew. The choreography was simple – each audience participant was assigned a numbered station somewhere along the yellow brick road – that orange stripe – and each was responsible for listening to each whispered phrase from the “message initiator” and transmitting all of them to the participant at the next numbered station. A large electronic clock ticked the limited minutes away – as with dance, time was an essential element in the whole.
Wending our way through (and briefly outside) Abrons was a worthwhile event on its own. Who knew how much goes on in that building? The skyline views from rehearsal and administrative rooms were impressive (including one from the men’s urinal that many of us would never have seen outside of this piece.) Being part of the infrastructure was its own illumination.
At first, as the messages were transmitted, we tried to understand them for meaning before passing them on. Eventually, though, as the messages came more quickly, the participants lost track of meanings, and just captured the words and phrases sufficiently to pass them on to the next player before learning a new phrase for transmission. Of many interesting communicated whispers, one of the messages that most intrigued me was “Time is a carrot (or carat?).”
The messages were transformed, fragment by fragment, person by person. As we moved through the stations, we talked to our partners; strangers became acquainted, and dance community members reconnected in unexpected corridors. At the end, the “message receiver” read aloud the final “Lecture” of messages, as constructed by this group, while the original ideas were projected on the back wall. Much was lost in translation, though many connections were made in the translating process. As the message receiver read back “Time is like a roll of parsley,” I looked back to read the original message on the wall -- “Time is inherent.” And that’s how this game is played.
Photos: Participants in "“Score for a Lecture.” Photo ©Ian Douglas.
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman