COMMUNAL RITUALS AND DESIRES
by
Douglas Messerli
Charles
Atlas (video), Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener (choreographers) Tesseract / Los Angeles, Redcat, the
performance I attended with Deborah Meadows was the Sunday, December 3, 2017
matinee
Charles Atlas (as photographer) and Rashaun Mitchell and Silas Riener (as co-choreographers) and principle dancers have created in Tesseract, performed this past week Redcat (the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) within the bowels the Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles. All three long worked as video director and dancers for Merce Cunningham, and joined up after Cunningham’s death to create their own dance collaborations.
There is no question that their art still retains a great many of the hallmarks of Cunningham’s company, including their hours of rehearsal without music and their use of quirky and muscular positionings of their bodies, as well as stunning original costumes and carefully-timed group patterning.
Yet, in Tesseract and other works on which the two beautiful dancers have
collaborated with a talented company, some of whom also worked with Cunningham
(in particular, David Rafael Botana), and others who have had long experience
in dance and choreography themselves, they have also created something very different
wherein, despite the work’s overall abstractness, also carries with it subtle
narrative patterns.
Tesseract
was broken into two acts, the first of which, Tesseract ⸋ is performed on video only and the second of which Tesseract ○ is performed live behind a
scrim on which a camera projects various of their on-stage movements in
expanded form.
The two symbols, cube and circle, hint at
the various patterns upon which are played out in the general movements of the
entire company. The first, which Atlas has described as a kind of sci-fi story
about a group of space aliens, who at times speak in absolute gibberish, while
dressed in beautiful white costumes with black cubes attached to them. creating
a kind of double-cube patterning or what Los
Angeles Times dance reviewer, Laura Bleiberg, pointed out, becomes a cube prism
(the costumes having been also designed by the two choreographers).
In one of the most specular moments of
this first part, the figures, backed by large colorful geometric patterns are
turned through the tricks of video art into one large kaleidoscopic wonderment.
My theater companion for the evening, Deborah Meadows, told me how much as a
child she loved her kaleidoscope, playing with it for hours at a time, as had
I.
Yet, I believe the sci-fi aspect of this
part to be less convincing than simply a story (if one can imagine one) of a
communal group, coming and going, sometimes forcing out one another, while
attempting to play out their various sexual feelings for each another. The
first piece ends with a stunning sexual pas
de deux between Mitchell and Riener, the later having let down his beautiful
long tresses (which he previously has worn as a bun in the back his head), while
he makes amazing terpsichorean love to Mitchell.
The
only thing I found a bit distracting about this first section, as well somewhat
inexplicable, was the constant re-framing of the video dancers, with black
borders coming in from both sides. But in a piece that is constantly suggesting
a reality from different perspectives, sometimes creating a kind of startling visual
confusion, in which, particularly in the later part, it is difficult to know whether
to center one’s gaze on the dancers or upon the cinematic-like images, it is
surely an intentional device to help us to perceive that human eyes can never
truly take in the whole of a group dance performance. Our focus is constantly
shifting. For the first section of the dance, the audience members were asked
to don 3-D glasses, which also took the work into other dimensions.
The second part of Tesseract begins very much like the first with a pattern of a cube,
the figures this time clad in mesh-textured white robes, who enter, one by one,
to fit into the pattern; but as the group expands, breaking away into other
lesser connected groups, they come together as a circle of interlocking hands.
When one of their midst seems to suffer from a series of muscle spasms, he
breaks way from the others, as several of them try, unsuccessfully, it appears,
to bring him back into the community. It is perhaps only when the red-clad
cameraman, Ryan Jenkins, whose images project the same dancers in giant-size
images on the scrim, that allows them each, one by one, to come into their own
individuality, while retaining on the stage behind a sense of communal ritual
that vaguely reminded me, at moments, of Stravinsky’s and Nijinsky’s powerful Rite of Spring, but of course without
the insistent narrative aspects of that work. These are neither primitives nor a
community determined to sacrifice one of their own for anything, but simply a
communal gathering working to interact (or even “tesseract,” a word that
suggests a wrinkle in time-traveling) with each other. In the end, even the
red-garbed, sequined-shoed cameraman joins in on their strenuous group
celebration.
I do agree with Bleiberg that, as much as
I truly love the Redcat space, perhaps Tesseract might have been more
successfully performed on a large stage such as Brooklyn’s BAM. Evidently some
couldn’t observe the interplay of images and performers, particularly from the
higher levels of the theater. I sat closer to the stage and had no difficulty
perceiving them. But these are minor quibbles about a major work which I was
delighted to see on a Los Angeles stage, and can only congratulate the Redcat
staff for scheduling it.
Los Angeles,
December 4, 2017
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