{"id":1135,"date":"2012-11-01T14:55:13","date_gmt":"2012-11-01T18:55:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=1135"},"modified":"2012-11-01T19:57:50","modified_gmt":"2012-11-01T23:57:50","slug":"then-plus-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/11\/then-plus-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Then Plus Now"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Valda Setterfield duplicating an Eadweard Muybridge photo in David Gordon’s THE MATTER\/2012: Art & Archive<\/em>. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

David Gordon is the King of Repetition, and I don\u2019t want to hear any back talk. He manages dance material like someone holding an object up to direct sun, then to a candle flame, setting it against different backgrounds, turning it sideways. \u201cLook at it now. Now look again.\u201d He\u2019s also a master re-arranger\u2014juxtaposing past to present, rehearsal to performance, new to old, life to art.<\/p>\n

Gordon was one of the original members of Judson Dance Theater, so it\u2019s fitting that his THE MATTER\/2012 Art & Archive<\/em> be shown as part of Danspace Project\u2019s ongoing Platform 2012: Judson Now<\/em>, which honors the 50th<\/sup> anniversary of that gloriously, crazily, brainily obstreperous bunch of artists, who put on their first show at Judson Church in 1962. The performances at St, Mark\u2019s Church constitute a highly selective retrospective of Gordon\u2019s own early career, focusing on his solo Mannequin <\/em>(1962), <\/em>three versions of The Matter<\/em> (1971, 1972, 1979), Chair <\/em>(1975), and The Photographer <\/em>(1983). He has woven together in ingeniously theatrical ways photographs, film and video clips, live-feed video, props, and text that scrolls continuously along the base of St. Mark\u2019s Church\u2019s balcony.<\/p>\n

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Part of\u00a0 the set-up in St. Mark’s Church (rehearsal). Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

Entering the church is like walking into an installation, except that we\u2019re confined to seats along one of the side walls. Here\u2019s what we see bathed in Jennifer Tipton\u2019s splendid lighting. Blue metal folding chairs, neatly set in place within taped lines; a small central platform; five medium-sized portable screens, each bearing six panels of archival black-and-white photographs; one-largish, photograph-studded cube; two panels each bearing a looped video\u2014an overhead shot of three people (one of them Gordon\u2019s son, Ain) moving dishes around on a table, another of the 1972 The Matter<\/em> performance.<\/p>\n

Three hanging panels at the back initially show (many times, in several poses) ten people important in Gordon\u2019s history (including three who performed in The Matter<\/em> in the 1970s). Also included: Laurie Uprichard, former director of Danspace; Brenda Way, head of the dance department at Oberlin College when The Matter<\/em> premiered there; lighting designer Philip Sandstrom; Bill T. Jones; and Elizabeth Streb. This stylish and handsome museum also includes music (I can identify the voice of David Vaughan, as one of the many heard singing the 1910 hit \u201cEvery Little Movement Has a Meaning All Its Own\u201d).<\/p>\n

The poses of these \u201cguests\u201d evoke Eadweard Muybridge, the late 19th<\/sup>-century photographer whose stop-action images of athletes, dancers, horses, etc. implied\u2014like a film strip\u2014the motion between positions. Muybridge was the subject of The Photographer<\/em>, an opera by Philip Glass \u00a0that Gordon choreographed for its performances on BAM\u2019s 1983 Next Wave season. But Muybridge\u2019s images were also the guiding structure behind a solo, One Part of the Matter<\/em>, that Gordon made with his wife, Valda Setterfield. It is the poses from that solo that the marvelous Setterfield carefully assumes (appropriate facial expressions and all) on the platform in the middle of St. Mark\u2019s. At the same time, we hear Gordon kibitzing and Setterfield arguing (and both of them laughing) during an early rehearsal of the solo, while the text of their dialogue runs along above the action.<\/p>\n

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An updated “Kingdom of the Shades,” led by Valda Setterfield and Karen Graham. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

THE MATTER\/2012 Art & Archive<\/em> begins and ends with a procession. I choke up during both. The first is an iteration of a parade that Gordon presented on the Dance in America program, Beyond the Mainstream. <\/em>The accompaniment is Ludwig Minkus\u2019s repetitive melody for Act III of Petipa\u2019s 1877 La Bayad\u00e8re. <\/em>Only instead of a ghostly corps de ballet of 32 women repeating the same four-measure phrase over and over, as they fill the stage with a zig-zag pattern, Gordon\u2019s 32 people simply walk.<\/p>\n

Setterfield leads the long line of seven featured dancers and 24 students from the Department of Drama at NYU\u2019s Tisch School of the Arts. Dressed in assorted, everyday black clothes, they walk at a measured, leisurely pace; some have their hands in their pockets or hold them clasped behind them. Tall, short, skinny, voluptuous, glamorous, plain, young, mature, male, female, they pass gravely by. But shortly after they turn the first corner to start the zig-zag, they appear to approach a concealed camera; the screens across the back fill with close-up, black-and-white images of their faces. Because of the camera\u2019s angle (Madeline Hollander is the media artist) and the turns of the procession, we see faces and half faces and quarter faces and slices of faces behind the leader of the moment. It\u2019s like watching humanity on the march in some apocalyptic movie.<\/p>\n

Archival images and scrawled notes link present and past. Scott Cunningham and Karen Graham (longtime Gordon performers) talk and practice movements, and they, plus Andrew Champlin and Jeremy Pheiffer, work in pairs while films and stills of Setterfield and Gordon rehearsing a duet are projected on the rear sheet. It\u2019s that unforgettable early duet in which they take turns slipping out of an embrace and returning to it, while the partner left behind maintains the position, arms enfolding air. How young and beautiful and tender they look in one projection (and only slightly older in the other)!<\/p>\n

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Chair Dance<\/em>. Identifiable (L to R): Jeremy Pfeiffer, David Irwin, and Andrew Champlin, and Lauren Kelly Ferguson. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

In The Matter\/2012: Art & Archive, <\/em>life and art intersect too. In his early Judson work, Mannequin Dance<\/em>, Gordon, wearing a bloody lab coat\u2014holding out his hands and wiggling his fingers\u2014slowly revolved while descending into a squat and singing (in a Yiddish accent) \u201cGet Married, Shirley, Get Married\u201d and another song. At St. Mark\u2019s, his 1962 image backs the young 2012 performers doing the minimal dance and singing under their breaths in their own timing (the church resonates like a discreet beehive). The scrolling text reminds us that in 1962 Gordon was dealing with a recent experience\u2014counteracting a case of body lice while slowly lowering himself into a bathtub of disinfectant; the words also revealed that he\u2019d had to race to perform Mannequin Dance <\/em>at Judson from the hospital where his son had just been born.<\/p>\n

The action onstage accumulates, dissolves, and cross-fades with a filmic fluency. The past embeds itself in new circumstances and acclimates. Chair Dance<\/em>, originally a duet for Gordon and Setterfield, is performed in a unison line by Cunningham, Graham, Leslie Cuyjet, and Lauren Kelly Ferguson, along with David Irwin, Pheiffer, and Champlin\u2014with each first person eventually running to the end and the second one advancing to the lead. Toward the end of the 50-minute retrospective, more and more students, facing us, join for a speeded-up version of the maneuvers\u2014sitting in various ways, tipping the chair, crawling through its openings, lying beneath it. And the final snaking parade consists of Muybridge poses on the move, while Philip Glass\u2019s music for The Photographer<\/em> swells and exalts. This procession ends with the performers arranging themselves in tiers on the altar steps. By the time Setterfield, the star, has slipped into a place kept for her in the ranks, the cast members resemble a choir about to burst into a resounding hymn. But because this is a postmodernist\u2019s jubilee, they don\u2019t. They take a curtain call.<\/p>\n

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Setterfield amid the winding procession of photos come to life. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

A bounty of imagination, wit, skill, and, yes, love went into those five decades of work. And into this beautifully constructed living album that reconsiders them.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

David Gordon is the King of Repetition, and I don\u2019t want to hear any back talk. He manages dance material like someone holding an object up to direct sun, then to a candle flame, setting it against different backgrounds, turning it sideways. \u201cLook at it now. Now look again.\u201d He\u2019s also a master re-arranger\u2014juxtaposing past […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1140,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[166,474,203,170,247,472,473,167],"class_list":{"0":"post-1135","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-postmodern-new-york","8":"tag-david-gordon","9":"tag-eadweard-muybridge","10":"tag-jennifer-tipton","11":"tag-karen-graham","12":"tag-philip-glass","13":"tag-scott-cunningham","14":"tag-the-matter2012-art-archive","15":"tag-valda-setterfield","16":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1135"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1135\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1140"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1135"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1135"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1135"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}