Gay City News (New York, NY) Volume 75, Number 43 | October 27 - November 2, 2005

Fresh From Seattle

Amy O’Neal’s "convenience" offers humor, originality, and surprise

By GUS SOLOMONS, JR.

A troupe of young collaborators from Seattle calling itself "locust" performed at Joyce SoHo for only two days, October 14 and 15. More’s the pity, because they crammed so much inventiveness, wittiness, and youthful energy into their hour-long dance-music-video show, "convenience," that we can’t wait to see them back in New York soon.

The company’s founders, performer and composer Zeke Keeble and dancer and choreographer Amy O’Neal, who conceived and directed "convenience," are joined by performing collaborators Ellie Sandstrom, also a dancer, and Troy Miszklevitz and Gabriel Baron, both trained as actors. The piece is a continuous array of short, whimsical, and revelatory movement episodes, infused with humor, freshness, and surprise, deftly performed with unmannered grace and gutsy abandon.

The dancing climaxes in a brisk unison duet for the women, which features powerful, low-to-the-ground moves, like break dancers doing Pilates. Throughout, the dance structure recapitulates themes while adding new material. Then, like a magician revealing his tricks, the performers disassemble the video sitting room, which turns out to have been a live shot of the setup backstage. They array the carpet squares along the onstage walls, and do a final movement canon, each framed by a luminous rectangle courtesy of imaginative lighting designer Julie Keenan. As each one finishes moving, his or her light fades in turn, and the wonderful "locust" community dissolves.

Check out the following letter from the Artistic Director of NEEDCOMPANY (Belgium). I think it does an excellent job describing the plight of artists in the early 21st century as they find themselves beyond post modern radicalism, trying to make art that registers during troubling times.

Brussels September 2005

Dear Reader,

In the summer just past we were guests at festivals in Avignon, Marseille and Vienna and after that we visited the Venice Biennale. I often had to think of what Michel Houellebecq wrote in De koude revolutie: ‘that atmosphere of decomposition, of cheerless failure that hangs around contemporary art, in the end grabs you by the throat; at that moment you may magnanimously long for Joseph Beuys and his ideas. Which does not alter the fact that his art gives us a mercilessly precise picture of the age [...] Contemporary art depresses me but I realise there is no better comment on the present state of affairs.’

I believe that the depression aroused by contemporary art is not particularly interesting. I am convinced that these depressions only occur in overindulged western middle-class art. One ought not to forget that almost all the artists who in the late 60s and early 70s destroyed themselves with conviction by swallowing pills, cutting themselves with knives and drinking ammonia have either committed suicide or gone mad. Most of them worked in silence, almost underground and out of sight. Now Vandekeybus has a dancer cut himself in the biggest theatres and censors himself. Just as Fabre did not ‘allow’ any pissing in the Palais des Papes in Avignon. It’s not the censor that alarms me but the outcry that follows. This outcry is an indication of short-sightedness. As if the subversiveness of art had now actually occupied a central position in our society. Nothing could be further from the truth. Radical art is dark and full of energy and takes place in the very smallest corners of our soul. Not in a packed theatre where convention is the standard. Shakespeare already understood this. When he decided to withdraw from the theatre it was not because of censorship or depression, but for socio-economic reasons: the queen had decreed that the theatre should no longer be free. Now we consider it normal that the price of tickets for a play about fourth-world issues should double because it costs too much (see Wolf, the super production by Mortier, the man with sixteen hundred staff).

I am convinced that the rapid changes in our moral codes have overtaken the artistic avant-garde. There is a great urge for security. The success of Isabella’s room is mainly because of that: the accessible openness of the performers, the music and the linear story give the audience a ‘false’ sense of security. And yet I know that this play is necessary. I am more than ever aware that it is becoming increasingly difficult for art to find the right function or redefinition. For me the keyword is ‘humanity’. And this humanity is too often confused with accessibility.

Regards,

Jan Lauwers