Archive for September 19th, 2005

DANCE IN THE DEEP END:
Site-specific Artist Reopens Public Space in Brooklyn

photo by Richard Termine

Noemie LaFrance’s new site-specific “Agora,” is an arts festival unto itself, unexpectedly charming and whimsical with brooding moments interspersed. On Tuesday night, a ribbon cutting (of yellow police tape) and performance of “Agora” reopened the 50,000 square-foot McCarren pool in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint/Williamsburg neighborhood for the first time since 1983. LaFrance’s work inaugurates the site as an interim performance venue and laboratory for site-specific artists that will keep the pool open to the public as funds are raised to renovate. It also opens a new debate regarding the pool’s future and the role of local artists in shaping policy surrounding public space.

The McCarren pool, a project of the WPA, was built in 1936 to accommodate 6,800 swimmers, but LaFrance filled the crumbling relic with her moveable art installations, 30 dancers, and guest performers who wailed away on the vast stretch of concrete pool bottom—tracing abstract narrative threads that overlapped and intersected. The shifting scenes evoked antagonism, self-adsorption, exhibitionism, eroticism, playfulness, and celebration—many ghosts from the pool’s past. Throughout the work, these apparitions came to us as conversations with the architecture’s history—but also spoke of a much larger notion of public space and inter-activity and the utter engagement of people with place.

photo by Richard Termine

The team of skillful performers dove in and out of the action in furious flashes of fully-invested movement—from large, recognizable dance that filled the space to more nuanced gestures focused by careful staging. Occasionally, the performers would converge to serve up a hefty helping of expansive unison movement, which proved to be restful to the eye and mind before the action fragmented and scattered once again, leaving us to reconcile and prioritize our perceptions. In all of LaFrance’s choices, the results seemed determined by a response to the demands of the site; and therefore, overly precious experimentalism—all too often privileged in contemporary dance—bowed to the integrity of overall design.

Lighting by Thomas Dunn made use of the pool’s original lighting for night swimming, and together with a multi-channel sound score by Brooks Williams and Norm Scott, amplified the palate of movement textures and motley tableaus: a riotous disco; a rolling bed scene, high-impact antics in an inflatable pool, hula-hoopers atop raised islands, a Flamenco pilgrimage, and preening junkies in the deep end. These scenes and more manifested and dissolved, only to be replaced by a multiplicity of others. As women carrying baskets fell into the pool and made their way center to pick up fallen oranges, the piece resolved itself as the scene of a marketplace (or “Agora” in Greek, which has several connotations for the public sphere). Two casually dressed figures from the audience joined in to survey the possibilities, and we were left to ponder whether they were spectators or part of the spectacle.

“Agora” runs through October 1 at 8pm.

For tickets, directions and further information visit sensproduction.org or call 718-302-5024.

by Tom Pearson (September 15, 2005)