Catherine Sullivan: Angel Orensanz Foundation/Whitney Museum of American Art

Catherine Sullivan is in the proces of creating an exciting material substance of work that dissects the meaning of the word "to perform." Operating separately in the pair video and live performance, she creates paired installations and theater works that share source material and performers on the other hand emphasize the nature of different acting mode of expressions within each respective medium in fascinating fresh ways. That she achieves like a high level of sophistication in one as well as the other mediums makes her work all the more consequential.

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As a former actor herself, Sullivan is as vers in the meanss of directors Stanislavsky, Meyerhold, Kazan, and rill as she is in the (non)methods of Paul McCarthy and Mike Kelley with whom she studied as a graduate scholar This combination of interests drives her to fine-tune the moves and emotions, costumes and hold ups of her players with the diligence of an archivist and the license of a performance artist. It also leads her to constantly probe the distinctions between live and celluloid: On-screen in her multi-channel installations, figures are chop edited, and reassembled according to her have precise directorial eye; in performances, where she is, naturally, les in sway of what the viewer dioceses entire bodies careen through the sight lines of many pairs of organ of sights moving in multiple directions at once

Ice Floe of Franz Joseph Land, 2003 not awayed in a five-channel video installation at the Whitney and as a live performance at the Angel Orensanz Foundation in the Lower East Side, the pair as part of the 2004 Whitney Biennial, is an intriguing rendition of of that kind parallel plays. In the former, audiences for the most part stand while watching a twenty-five-minute black-and-white nooseed video, with attendant distractions of gallery visitors constantly upon the move, while in the latter they are seated, close-up concentrated upon a mass of warm-blooded performers in filled color for more than ninety minutes. allowing video and live productions share the same narrative, cast of characters, and an overall athletic physicality particular to Russian theater actors, it is the live version that, hands down, provides the greatest in quantity tension, not only because Ice Floe is based upon the musical Nord-Ost (adapted from the novel sum of two units Captains, by Veniamin Kaverin), which was playing in the Moscow theater seized through Chechen rebels in 2002, on the other hand also because more than thirty boisterous actors from Chicago's Trapdoor Theater race between files of seated audience members, making organ of vision contact as they go.

aligned in elaborate turn-of-the-century costumes or in the high fur hats and capes of an Arctic aboriginal, the players inhabit a "plastic" acting phraseology using the broad, repetitive gesticulations of pantomime, with little interaction among characters. They mix like zombies or rant and rave in chorus in followings that build to a crescendo, and then fall into silent stares of exhaustion. Phrases and actions are limited to puncture lines and punches and take place within an almost logarithmic rotation: The words "And father at no time returned!" for example, are repeated in the way that noisily and so frequently that the audience advances close to shouting out noisy along with the actors. Indeed, this expressionistic, highly choreographed play reminds us that theater is as plenteous about public assembly and public exchange as it is about representing states of desire, disgust, or empathy.

Sullivan's timing and faculty of perception of rhythm are more in evidence in the film installation than in the live production. If this had been a film, she would have left the last twenty minutes upon the proverbial cutting-room floor. She also would have erected a more varied visual periodical emphasis to certain scenes, applying her acute faculty of perception of sequencing to prevent those long scenes of over-the-top behavior from tiring the viewer. on the contrary the excitement of Sullivan's work is this: She has staked on the outside a vast field of operation for her time to come that speaks of history, contemporary agriculture politics, and the myriad ways in which these can be examined and articulated visually, linguistically, and aurally, in sum of two units dimensions and in three. It is a landscape of enormous promise.

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