All from Scratch

“Star Crap Method”
Larissa Velez-Jackson

American Realness Festival
Abrons Arts Center
New York, NY
January 15, 2016

by Martha Sherman
copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman

Larissa Velez-Jackson unabashedly claims “Star Crap Method” as the summation of her life’s work and philosophy. In “Star Crap,” Velez-Jackson improvises around a few set movements (“problematic unison dance phrases,”) with her excellent dancers, Tyler Ashley and Talya Epstein. Their goal is to be entirely real and in the moment. In this version, they were also shadowed by a masked wraith who hugged the walls, and was later introduced in the head-scratching role of “Cisgender Illuminatrix,” Kathy Kaufman. As in many American Realness presentations, Velez-Jackson's work is projected through a lens of humor (much of it dark) with the audience invited in as co-conspirators. 

 

Photo: Talya Epstein, Tyler Ashley, and Larissa Velez-Jackson in “Star Crap Method.” Photo ©Ian Douglas.

“Star Crap” was one of several works getting reprised during the American Realness festival. An earlier iteration was seen at the Chocolate Factory, where the textured space (wall pipes, windows, radiators) provided more for the dancers to interact with physically. Here, in the black box Experimental Theater of Abrons, the performers were left to more tenuous devices of their own making, and the movements were less interesting and dynamic. Three large mirrored panels on wheels helped a little, but not enough.

In trio jumble, the performers reeled around the floor, sometimes robotic, sometimes spastic, with an occasional balletic leap or rotation. They bounced against the walls and into each other. Since these were individual improvisations, their intersections are more like collisions than collaborations. Each performer had a solo, built on their own thoughts in the moment, spoken aloud, and sometimes enacted. Epstein soloed first; her movements were athletic, but pedestrian; her spoken thoughts were just pedestrian (“holding pants in my hand; backing away from center stage.”)

Velez-Jackson’s solo fell into the hard-to-avoid present of the Festival moment: she pled aloud for a manager, and for a presenter to take a chance on her. She walked in large circles, balanced on the edge of the three mirrors that surrounded her, and climbed around the handrails in the audience. Her solo offered a sample of what is best and worst about “Star Crap Method” – its rawness and truths, as well as the boring or awkward reality of any given  moment.

Often, the dancers moved like a small animal herd; when one began to vocalize, the others were drawn in – moaning, yowling, babbling. The unison dance sequences were trios of diagonal patterns, as the three moved from one corner of the stage to another in parallel leaps, turns, and sashays. In a final scene, the three dancers paraded in front of the mirrors, each in a snazzy skirted costume and dazzling platform heels; they sang a self-conscious song as if offering a frothy dessert. As the dancers laid down on a raised platform, the audience was invited to turn them into a sculpture, winding the trio into cords and adding bits and pieces to the platform, from the debris littering the edges of the stage.

When “Star Crap Method” works, and Velez-Jackson and her dancers click, there are moments of marvelous physical humor, honesty, and even beauty (watching Tyler Ashley stretch his long torso and crumple into an animal wriggle in his own solo, for example.) The ephemeral gift of dance – that you are either there for a spectacular Moment, or that you’re not – is the promise of “Star Crap.” Alas, sometimes the Moment doesn’t happen -- it wouldn’t be a risk, though, if it always did.

Photo: Tyler Ashley, Larissa Velez-Jackson, and Talya Epstein in “Star Crap Method.” Photo ©Ian Douglas.

copyright © 2016 by Martha Sherman