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Abe Abraham
By R. Pikser Jack’s, the performance space in re-gentrifying Brooklyn’s Clinton Hill, looks like it was once a garage. The tin-foil covered walls of the one room provide an intimate space for young performers to learn their craft, and the price is doable for the equally young audience members. This review will discuss video installation of dance, but there were also a musical group, several dancers, and an improv company.
Abe Abraham, whose piece opened the evening, has created a three-screen video piece of movement set to sounds of the Earth’s shiftings, recorded and vastly speeded-up by seismologist J. T. Bullitt. Whether we would find the sounds equally interesting if we did not know their provenance is not clear. Though the dance itself was performed and seen in real human time, technology seems to control everything. The audience is only allowed to see bits and pieces of bodies and each visual is dissociated from the others, because of the screens, though they may have been performed at the same moment. The few movements, or poses, much repeated, that we see from several different angles, clearly evoke pain. Arms are locked around heads, or around legs; whose body part belongs to whom is not clear, nor is meant to be. One eye peeks out from an angle in between arms. Another eye, on another screen, does the same, sometimes at the same time, sometimes at a different moment. Lighting on the nude torsos as they writhe recalls dimly lit Renaissance sculpture. Attention is focused on tiny details that otherwise might be missed. The concomitant is that the audience is deprived of the sensual and kinetic experience of being in the same space as live bodies peforming more than one movement at a time. By allowing us to see only the minimal movements and the tiny pieces of bodies, or even to allow us only snatches of views of torsos twisting, Mr. Abraham deprives us of the chance to have other, richer experiences, possibly encompassing the moments he has chosen to highlight. Why does he not trust us to have our own experience? We might find something he had not thought of.
Mr. Abraham used 18 dancers in this film, including Bessie-award winner Megumi Eda. But for all we were able to see, he could have used only three or four dancers, and they needn’t have been stars. The question arises: How would a live piece have connected one movement to another? How would the dancers have moved in space? This may be the crux of why this reviewer ultimately found “Wind and Tree” to be unsatisfying. The possibilities of kinsethetic power were undercut not only because the movements were seen on three small screens, but because we were prevented from entering fully into the piece. If Mr. Abraham’s idea was to trap us into the screens along with his dancers, then he still needs to find a way to let us in. To Mr. Abraham’s credit, he is clearly trying to say something with this piece. It is not just another exercise in the use of limited movement to limited ends that comprises much contemporary choreography. In “Wind and Tree” there is pain. The dancers are either trapped, or are trapping themselves. They are buffeted about, or they are beating themselves so they can escape. This is not a happy piece, but at least Mr. Abraham is trying to tell us something from deep inside, and he has searched for some movements appropriate to what he wants to say. Now he needs to complete the trajectory, and to trust himself, and us to follow it. Abe Abraham
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