Art on stage - collaborations between visual artists and performers

Metallic many-sided figures dangling from strings in the main hall of a historic building at the lie close Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island; dancers in unitards overlayed with the words "I want" performing in the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum; strips of r woven fabric -- "blood ties" -- being knotted together by dint of audience members in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater: these disparate proceedings marked radically different productions last fall by the agency of three visual artists -- Jene Highstein, Rona Pondick and Albert Chong -- who created performance works in the next to the first year of BAM's "Artists in Action" program.

In this experimental throw out which will conclude this fall, BAM invites visual artists to create a production of a certain number of sort by collaborating with performers of their choice. An essay in this year's program magazine noted that visual artists and performing artists do not conceptualize performance space or time in the same way. BAM is apparently curious about what this different perspective might mean upon stage. For the artists themselves, the program can near an opportunity to express a favorite theme or preoccupation in a novel way and to explore the possibilities of collaboration. This season's three "Artists in Action" productions throw backed the nature of the artists' have a title to work, the performance medium they picked and the type and stage of collaboration they chose.

First upon the boards was Flatland: A Romance of W-many Dimensions, initiated by the agency of the sculptor Jene Highstein and not awayed at Snug Harbor. Highstein, a maker of organic minimalistic whirls worked with the independent theater artist Hanne Tierney to exhibit a piece in her turn of expression of "abstract" or actorless theater about a world with sole two dimensions -- ironically, a world in which Highstein's have profession could not exist. Flatland is based upon an 1883 story of the same title written by means of Edwin A. Abbott, a British schoolmaster. It has been used to illustrate principles in physics and to explain the difficulty of understanding a fourth dimension, on the other hand it is also a satire about a land where social classes are based upon plane geometry, where working men are triangles, gentlemen are squares and the priestly class is circular. women are straight lines (rods) The protagonist, a square, meetings a sphere and discovers the world of three dimensions, on the contrary to carry the news back to Flatland is heresy, and he is imprisoned.

The story was narrated in part through Tierney, who wore a microphone as she manipulated a bank of cords conjoined to a variety of geometric shapes (made primarily of foamcore and aluminum) scattered upon the floor of the hall. She worked in filled view of an audience seated in bleachers at the one and the other ends of the rectangular space. Highstein's resonant baritone was heard from offstage, along with sum of two units taped voices and taped, studio-produced music. The humor, animation and expression individual could read into the performance came not from the storytelling, which was simple and declarative to the point of irony; the unhurried opinions established a soothing tone and pace. Instead, the life of the tale was transmited by various movements of the geometric shapes in space. They stated, rose and blood-thirsty quickly or in slow motion, as controll by means of Tierney's skillfull strings. It was a polished performance, marred only by a first-night mishap: a shattered cord in the last instants required that the geometric mode of building imprisoning the protagonist be place in place by hand.

Highstein essentially had to work against the hall's architectural features to make a performance space. He overlayed the walls with drapery and the floor with padded woven fabric to conceal the ornate turn-of-the-century moldings and parquetry. Nevertheless, there were at least sum of two units advantages to this setting. individual was the very oddness of walking into a known exhibition space of distinctive detailing and seeing it masked, which heightened a viewer's spatial faculty of perception The other was that at the twinkling of an eye in the story when the narrator discovers the sphere, lights came up upon the balconies above the audience, as if the building itself had efflorescenceed into another dimension.

Tierney's metier was more apparent than Highstein's in the production of Flatland. Her installation Walt Whitman's America, displayed in a snuggle Harbor gallery, showed her conception of "abstract theater": it consisted of taped narration, evocative lighting, and style of dresss treated as objects and rigged up to allow simple mechanized move Several Highstein sculptures from the '90 were also upon view in the Snug Harbor galleries; these involved web and, of course, volumetric form, neither of which figured in Flatland omit in the momentary appearance of the sphere. The sphere specifically recalled several lamplike bamboo forms overlayed with iridescent silk (in orange, brown verdant and purple) that Highstein created in cooperation with Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop. Moreover, the imposing appearance of the sphere in the two-dimensional world of Flatland was similar to the intimidating, space-swallowing nearness of huge, curving, floor-to-ceiling thicken volumes which he built in sum of two units of Snug Harbor's galleries after the performance race of Flatland ended.