Writer-in-residence Carl Paris on New Work by Will Rawls and Isabel Lewis

PLATFORM 2012: Parallels 

Last Thursday, February 9 Danspace Project presented the first of its live performances in PLATFORM 2012: Parallels. As with the original 1982 Parallels (also curated by Houston-Jones), this year’s series is primarily aimed at providing a forum for African, African American, and Caribbean choreographers who work outside the mainstream of modern dance in individualistic experimental strategies. But, for this performance, the fact that Will Rawls is African American and Isabel Lewis is from the Dominican Republic seemed less important than their emergence as two choreographers with some thought-provoking ideas about combining postmodern deconstructionism and new-millennium pedestrianism.

Rawls presented his new solo Frontispieces (part of the Collected Fictions project), an interesting choice of title; and one, that infers for me a point of departure.

Will Rawls. Photo by Ian Douglas

Riffing off The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary definition of “frontispiece” as a “decorative illustration facing a book’s title page or an architectural combination of elements that frame and decorate the main or front door to a building” (1991, 565), I see Rawls’s conception as an interplay between objects (both immobile and moveable) and the moving body in space. The objects here (designed by Paul Dallas) consist of eight life-sized cut-out German Shepard dogs—colored variously in shades of brown and black—all seated on their haunches with tongues out (dog smiles) and their remaining styrofoam frames. There is also a folding ladder, and a push broom. The space consisted of nearly the entire performance area, except where the audience sat.

Taking full advantage of his long beautifully-trained body, Rawls begins the piece, rising between two dogs, first striking prolonged linear poses and gradually morphing them into fluid and multidimensional dance sequences. At first, because it is my nature, I could not resist asking myself “why the dogs?” Perhaps they reference the 1950s TV dog star Rin Tin Tin, or Lassie (wait, he/she was a collie), a childhood pet, or the cover of a book. But that is as far as I got, so I gave up trying to make associations.

As the piece unfolds, I imagine Rawls is exploring discrete threads between the utilitarian and the visceral. In random moments, he walks from place to place, adjusts things and changes his clothes. He plays with the dogs, not as if relating to them, but by manipulating them between his toes as he lies on the floor, or by shifting them around in space, by placing them atop a ladder or piano, or by throwing pieces of styrofoam around randomly. In more dancey sequences, he works through subtle glimpses of sensuality, humor, or purposefulness, at one point, breaking out into a funky African dance with a fluffy codpiece over his underwear to accentuate the pelvic movement. Here, Kathy Kaufman’s lighting of blue and amber pools and frequent rolling fades nicely delineate change of mood and intensity. And similarly engaging is the multilayered score (music: “Sayancé,” by Jonathan Melville Pratt), which contains text, a blues song that says “Nobody will take the place of you,” as well as bird chirps and the brushing of a broom. By the end of nearly forty minutes, set to another text about the sun, the sea, a window, a chair and a plea for “you to be there,” I realize that what has most transfixed me was Rawls: Rawls the body in motion, Rawls the body at rest, Rawls exploring where all this could take him, with intelligence and conviction.

Watching Isabel Lewis’s Synthetic Action makes me think she asked herself the question, “What can I do with twenty or more dancers of various ethnic backgrounds and technical training, and with very little rehearsal time that would be of the conceptual caliber expected at Danspace Project?” Judging from what unfolded, her answer was “a warm up.” But that is a deceptively simple answer, although that is where I start.

Isabel Lewis’s “Synthetic Action.” Photo by Ian Douglas

One by one, dancers large and small, dressed in studio dance clothes, enter the space and begin to warm up their bodies as if preparing for a class, audition, or rehearsal. Gradually we see that these warm ups are almost as individualized and varied as the dancers themselves. Some do exercises from a variety of styles and techniques like Limon, Horton, release, Pilates, hip-hop, or yoga. A few build into short highly technical sequences, with extraordinary balances and leg extensions. One female dancer repeats snappy street moves over and over again. Others run around, breathe heavily, or lay around almost immobile, flexing their ankles repeatedly, slapping their thighs, stretching on the floor, or propping their legs against the columns.

Interestingly, while Rawls’s title Frontispieces helped me tie his work together, Lewis’s title Synthetic Actions did not. I could not quite apply the notion of “synthetic” to what I saw; and likely that was intentional. Nevertheless, at times, the concept of ritual came to mind—perhaps an honoring of the individual in preparation to dance. In a more conceptual moment, I thought of a constantly morphing tableau, juxtaposing static spatial and postural scenarios of human bodies. Ultimately, though, I found it most interesting to be able to focus on each dancer at one moment or another without fear of losing the whole, even as some part of me waited for the dance part to come, and even though I knew it would not.  And here again, it was Kathy Kaufman’s use of strong warm colors—amber, violet, blue, or red—that helped engage a sense of time and texture.

With this first dance performance, PLATFORM 2012: Parallels “looks forward” to quote Houston-Jones (see curatorial statement in the Parallels Catalogue). In doing so, it confirms that, among emerging choreographers today, the experimentalist trope remains ever-dynamic and intertextual, combining a tradition of challenging established process and the philosophic and aesthetic streams that reflect 21^st-century postmodern sensibilities.

-Carl Paris

***