BAM Fisher Opens with Two Premieres

Photo by Stephanie Berger

By Meredith Benjamin

Just around the corner from the BAM Howard Gilman Opera House sits the newest addition to Brooklyn’s performance venues, the BAM Fisher on Ashland Place. Opened in September, the building houses the Fishman Space, a flexible 250 seat theatre, which allows BAM to present smaller-scale, experimental work that previously had no home in its larger theatres. The space can be reconfigured according to the artist’s request: while we often hear about site-specific works, this will be a work-specific site. Two such possibilities of how the space might be used were on view in its first two weeks of performances, first with the world premiere of Jonah Bokaer and Anthony McCall’s formalist collaboration ECLIPSE, and then with the New York premiere of Nora Chipaumire’s dark and challenging Miriam, directed by Eric Ting.

ECLIPSE

The Fishman Space actually smelled new for the first public performance on September 6. The most striking feature of the space however, was McCall’s light installation: thirty-six light bulbs hung from the ceiling at increasing heights, creating a slanted slope of light. As audience members wandered through this forest of light, the shape of which shifted depending on your positioning, we were confronted with the choice of where to sit. Two or three rows of seats surrounded the central carpeted square that formed the stage area, in addition to balcony-level seating on three of the four sides.

Once the audience was seated, the lights dimmed, and the room sank slowly into darkness. The lowest-hanging light bulb flickered on again, accompanied by a motor-like whirring noise, as if it were being powered by a generator. This simultaneity suggested an inherent connection between the installation and the performance. I later realized that the sound was actually that of a film projector, suggesting that the performances we watched represented different scenes from movies. But were they being recorded or being played back?

The light revealed Bokaer crouched (from my perspective) behind it. He eventually rose, wearing white pants and a button-down shirt, and an orange and yellow reflective vest, like that of a crossing guard. Rising, he made a series of gestures directed at individual bulbs along the perimeter of the stage, beginning with the one by which he was crouched and advancing up to one just above his head: seeming to warm the back of his neck under one, making a gesture of reaching toward another.

After this initial passage, in which alternately his gestures seemed to illuminate the bulbs or their illumination to initiate his gestures, his movements became larger and faster, involving his entire body. Bokaer’s elegant lines were dynamic and captivating as he whipped around, reached out, and then drew back in to a place of stability, pulling his fists towards his body as his toes turned outward and his heels drew together, in ballet’s first position. As he continued around the space, the evidence of his paths remained as lines in the carpet.

One by one, four additional dancers (Tal Adler-Arieli, CC Chang, Sara Procopio, and Adam H. Weinert) entered, similarly dressed (but without the vest). At first, they moved as a group, at one point walking in the same direction, as if entranced by some invisible point in the corner. Bokaer never engaged with these other dancers or with the audience. Despite his frequent proximity, his gaze remained focused and abstract. Although he came close to colliding with light bulbs or other dancers on a number of occasions, he never did.

After Bokaer exited, the four remaining dancers performed in various groupings and solos, often simultaneously. The illumination of different combinations of light bulbs created discrete spaces on the stage. At one point a diamond of light appeared in the center, and the two men engaged in a series of mutually supportive poses, increasingly more precarious, and transitioned from one to the next without releasing contact. A third dancer joined them in the light, first as an observer, and eventually as a third component to their shifting sculpture. While the middle sections of the piece featured a number of similarly captivating passages in which the dancers’ movements contrasted with the rigid formality of the lighting, space, and soundscape, they were, on the whole, overly long, an impression exacerbated by the repetitive, lulling sound of the film projector.

As the light bulbs went out at the end of each of four “scenes,” the noise of the film projector ceased and was replaced by the soundtrack of transportation: first the noise of a subway train rolling down the tracks, and later the rumblings of an airplane. It remained unclear where, or if, we had traveled in these interludes. Each time the lights came back on, the projector noise also started up again, each time from a different side of the room. In this way, David Grubb’s sound design highlighted the formalist relationship between the work’s components—the score, the choreography, and the set/lighting design—and the physical space.

Alone again at the end of the piece, Bokaer repeated his opening sequence, moving this time from highest to lowest, the bulbs going dark at his approach or departure. As the last bulb went out and he spun slowly offstage, the sound of the projector flickered to a stop.

Miriam

The Fishman Space was set up in much the same way for Chipaumire’s Miriam, with seats surrounding a central square, and the previously carpeted floor now covered with marley. The arrangement within that square, however (designed by Olivier Clausse), could not have been more different. Strewn with rubble, caution tape tied between stage lights, and a taped-up milk jug hanging from the ceiling, it was a scene of ruins which audience members gingerly skirted as they chose their seats. In an interview, Chipaumire described the set as “sort of a crime scene and sort of a sacred site.”

In her performance, one gets the sense that Chipaumire finds this description to be apt for the black female body as well, as she explores the ways that such bodies have been subject to both violence and veneration. According to the program notes, “Miriam” was inspired by a number of iconic female figures, including “the mother of Jesus, the sister of Aaron and Moses, [and] the iconic singer and political activist Miriam Makeba.” Drawing loosely on the lives and reputations of these women and others in her performance, Chipaumire confronts the way in which their bodies have been held up and revered as sacred sites, but are simultaneously “sort of a crime scene,” upon which the violence of racism, colonialism, and sexism have been written.

It was only after I sat down that I realized there was a leg sticking up out of the pile of garbage bags and rubble. This leg, belonging to Chipaumire, was at once askew and powerful, thrown-away and dancerly. She would play on these contrasts throughout the performance, mixing strong, purposeful movements with wild, unpredictable trajectories.

Her counterpart, Okwui Okpokwasili, was a tour de force. She played a myriad of roles: Chipaumire’s interrogator, tormenting director, narrator, dancing partner, and alter ego. She shifted seamlessly from inhabiting the voyeuristic colonizing voice of Heart of Darkness’s narrator to the perspective of the woman he describes on the shore: “It was my shore . . . you were the apparition  [. . . we were] praying for your death.”

Chipaumire rarely spoke clearly discernible words, her vocalizations primarily confined to high-pitched yips that often gave way to grunts. One word that did come through on multiple occasions, however, was “smile”: first offered by Chipaumire as a pleasurable exhale as she emerged from the garbage bags and rubble, later hurled at her by Okpokwasili as an order through a megaphone.

Chipaumire’s exaggerated performances of femininity (reminding herself to smile, high-pitched sighs, her attraction to a filmy dress) and the grotesque (the guttural grunts, her garbage-bag clothing, her exaggerated stomping) critiqued the numerous demands made of women (sometimes literally voiced by Okpokwasili). At one point, she and Okpokwasili stabbed at two sides of an aluminum mirror: slashing the mirror that both renders them an object of the gaze and literally stands between them.

The intentional difficulty in hearing her words extended to our vision as well: the lighting scheme for the whole piece was dark and shadowy. The exception was when the performers blinded us by shining lights directly in our eyes. As the performers occupied different areas of the stage, behind props or with their backs to us, sections of the audience strained to see what was taking place. The view from my seat was bifurcated by diagonal streams of caution tape. These obfuscations blocked or interrupted the potentially objectifying or other-ing gaze of the audience. These performers refused to be appropriated into empty images of femininity, blackness, or African-ness, as has often been the case with the women they reference. Often, one could see the other audience members more clearly than the performers—we were not permitted to be anonymous or passive consumers of art or bodies.

As she drew the piece to a close, amid a barrage of rolled caution tape hurled onto the stage, Chipaumire made her way back into the garbage-bag dress. She descended to her original position on the floor and let out shrieks of laughter as the lights went down. In the darkness, she left the stage, and did not return for a bow. Just as she had frustrated the desire of the audience to see and hear her clearly, here she denied us the comfort of seeing the performer without her mask(s). 

One comment to “BAM Fisher Opens with Two Premieres”
  1. Pingback: Bokaer and Chipaumire at BAM Fisher | A Spy in the House of Dance

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

 OpenCUNY » login | join | terms | activity 

 Supported by the CUNY Doctoral Students Council.  

OpenCUNY.ORGLike @OpenCUNYLike OpenCUNY