Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory" and other odes to retro habits at La Mama Moves

La Mama is a casual kind of place. I've shown up to review a dance version of "Medusa" without anyone mentioning that there would be lots of talking--in Japanese. Or, a couple of Sundays ago, only half the advertised performers actually performed. The other half had gone the day before.

This easy spirit is perfect for the La Mama Moves festival, which just finished up (sorry!) its glorious three weeks. The festival was experimental in the root sense: artists goofing around.   

On the Mavericks in Motion program on May 18, the pieces made especially for the occasion--and probably in short time--were dopey, gross, brawling, oozy, highly allusive, and very much of the moment. (Heather Olson's solo, excerpted from her Dance Theater Workshop premiere in March, "Curious Awake Not Possible," was naturally more polished. I don't know what I would have thought of the drama as a whole, but this part, with the always-splendid Olson doing the dancing, possessed a compelling oddness and clarity.)

Aaron Draper's "Fruitshake Polaroid" calls to mind food commercials--all of them--where food fills in for some other appetite. A man and woman dance, romance, and stuff their faces with Ho-Hos.

You may say, okay, I get how that's gross, oozy, and allusive, but new? The references in the other dances aren't of recent vintage, either: not the psychedelic light shows or the grunge spirit that cinematographer Ray Roy's "Red Light Special" brings to mind, nor the cassette tapes featured prominently in Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory." But what does feel current is the very plenitude of retro allusions--the ease with which the choreographers borrow from the past. 

"Red Light Special" sets the scene with a video screen behind the dancers multiplying them tenfold in red and green as they move sluggishly in the flesh. It comes into its own when pasty-faced Roy, in boxer shorts, and his two lady companions, in hoodies and underpants, plunk down in a row of institutional metal folding chairs and spread their legs, subway style.

Roy is getting off in a clammy, crackhead way on the nearness of them, while they, looking slovenly and hung over, are maintaining a heavy-lidded glumness, like he found them that day at the Laundromat after someone had stolen their clothes. If the American Apparel models let some natural light into their fluorescent cubes, it might look like this.

As I've complained on Foot more than once about the lack of movement invention among youngish choreographers, I should say that they are keen on the social realm. My favorite example on Sunday--the whole year, even--was Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory (work in progress)." 

The piece gives off such light in its unfinished state that you worry it might lose more than it gains by being completed. (Then--nature abhorring a vacuum--you figure out what might be gained and stop worrying.)

The dance begins in the pitch black. Someone empties a box of cassette tapes onto the floor and scoots them one by one across the space. It turns out that cassettes dropped and scattered make a sound so distinct that you can identify it in the dark. "Sound  Memory" calls up many things that have lain in the dark.

You may only remember a song's words and tune after it begins, but you usually know in advance how it will make you feel. It's as if the song were unwinding from you as much as from the tape: a reverse déjà vu, the song on tape imagined while the song in you is real. Sometimes the experience is inverted: you realize you've forgotten how much pleasure a song has given, over and over again. For weeks or months or years while you were thinking of other things, it held that pleasure, like someone holding a place for you in line.

That mix of certainty and anticipation--everything will proceed in order, and you will have to, you will get to, take it bit by bit--is specific to tape-playing. With an iPod or even with a record player (God forbid!), no one ever has to wait. And with an iPod, you can choose not only a particular tune but even randomness. (What kind of randomness is it, anyway, if you get to choose it?) Tape-playing has us wait for what we can't quite remember until it arrives.

"Sound Memory" gets at this boredom and relief, private memory and collective ritual, by very simple means. Three dancers (Barnett, Patrick Ferreri, and Hanna Kivioja) take turns picking cassettes off the floor, stuffing them into their individual boom boxes, and dancing alone to the song.

Years ago, these songs spent months in heavy rotation. Most of them are like the Counting Crows' "Mister Jones": dumb lyrics ("...and I felt so symbolic yesterday") and a dumb yet catchy beat. The dancer occasionally seems to be responding to the lyrics. More often, the song is only a point of departure--departed from so long ago, no one could possibly follow the path back.

Whenever someone says a dance is left open to our imaginations, I'm pretty sure I won't like it. Doesn't all dance do that? So what does it mean to announce it? "Sound Memory" doesn't leave the dance open to our imagination, it explores what an imagination does with what gets handed to it. The encodedness of this dancing is funny and to the point.

The dances to the individual songs could have been more distinct from person to person and song to song. My friend Elaine hoped Barnett would deploy a quasi-Cunninghamesque method as he proceeded: make a bunch of short dances, some of them to specific songs and some of them randomly assigned a song. The dancers then have this enormous repertory of dances in their heads--as we have song memories in ours--which they call up on the instant when a tape is picked off the floor.

What was amazing and rare was the texture--the way the dance fell in and out of formality. Sometimes it was antitheatrical: the dancer picking up a tape and plunking it in the player in a thoroughly pedestrian way, or losing the thread of his improvisation midway and just diddling around. And sometimes it was tightly rehearsed--the dancers tumbling over each as they progressed along a diagonal late in the piece. Usually when dances alternate back and forth like this, it means the choreographer doesn't know what he's doing. Here, it felt like listening to tapes: sometimes you're just listening and sometimes you're remembering. Sometimes it's in real time and sometimes it has the smooth patina of dream-memory. "Sound Memory (work in progress)" is the raw and the cooked together. 

Look for Julian Barnett's "Sound Memory" at Danspace Project at St. Mark's Church in March.

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"Sound Memory" made me think of all sorts of mental habits that current technology has made obsolete.

When you called someone before there were answering machines, you imagined the person walking to the phone, which was grafted to the wall or planted on a surface. If it kept ringing--and you could let it ring for as long as you wanted--you imagined the empty house and no one hearing the ring except maybe the dog, if he was home. And what did it mean to him?

Then there was being called--the mystery of it. You had no idea who it might be, and you had time to think about it. Nothing was going to happen if you didn't answer on the fourth ring except maybe the person would hang up. There was no answering machine to make you feel like a cheat. If you didn't want to answer, you could count the rings and extrapolate how much this person really wanted to talk to you (or maybe your sister, mother, father, or brother.)

In the second house I grew up in, people didn't call much, though they did come by--my mother's friends and the enticing friends of the artist who lived in our basement.

The basement arrangement was supposed to be temporary--the artist moved in because his girlfriend, who lived next door, had dumped him. But he was there for years, until another girlfriend took him in.

The basement, which mainly consisted of a carport, had no windows. When he wanted outside light, he'd open the carport door--his front door--and hang out in the driveway, him and his paint-speckled friends. The subject of his paintings, were, appropriately, cars. Big cars, little cars, red cars, blue cars.

When he got drunk, he would call--and call and call and call and call. It was like having the troll who usually stays under the bridge move in. You could practically hear him dialing before the ringing began.

My father didn't live with us, so he was the person I most looked forward to hearing from. For a year after he died, when the phone would ring I'd be halfway through anticipating it was him before I remembered it couldn't be.

Then I moved away to college, and there was nowhere to anchor that tense, achy hope to.

The phone and the home and the hope were of a piece for me, but I wonder whether in this evermore portable world the imagination binds itself more and more loosely to places and things.