{"id":697,"date":"2012-04-11T17:17:43","date_gmt":"2012-04-11T21:17:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/?p=697"},"modified":"2012-05-08T17:28:51","modified_gmt":"2012-05-08T21:28:51","slug":"feeding-the-animals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/2012\/04\/feeding-the-animals\/","title":{"rendered":"Feeding the Animals"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>

Non-dancers dancing in Michael Clark's Who's Zoo?<\/em>. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

\u201cI’m gonna make you howl like a wolf
\nScream like a pig
\nGo through the roof
\nLie down with the lion
\nBut to tell you the truth
\nI’m thinking about starting a zoo.\u201d<\/p>\n

So sings Jarvis Cocker, while, Jason Buckle, his mate in the Britpop duo Relaxed Muscle, pounds out a ripe, percussive smear of sound. Is this some red-lit, clinking- glasses club?\u00a0 No, it\u2019s the Olympic-pool-sized, fourth floor gallery of the Whitney Museum of American Art. And partway through British choreographer Michael Clark\u2019s Who\u2019s Zoo?<\/em>, the two musicians of both Relaxed Muscle and Pulp (Pulp\u2019s recorded songs have already been accompanying the dance) walk into place at one end of the gallery and cut loose. Cocker is garbed as his alter ego, Darren Spooner, which means that his face and hands are painted a greenish brown, and silver makeup traces a skeleton\u2019s skull on his face to match the bony phosphorescent ribs and spine on the tee-shirt he wears under a jacket.<\/p>\n

Cocker and Buckle only played live at certain performances of Who\u2019s Zoo?<\/em>, \u00a0since, as Pulp, they had other gigs in town. Seeing them in the flesh only reinforces the intriguing connections and disconnections between the visual and aural components of the work. It\u2019s hard to make out the gutty, seedy poetry of the lyrics, with their images of grimy flats, sordid liaisons, elusive love, drugged nights, and desperate bravado, but you get the point.<\/p>\n

Clark himself, who hasn\u2019t performed here since 2008, built his reputation in the 1980s. Long of limb, cherubic of face, he punked up his training at the Royal Ballet\u2019s school and his time in Ballet Rambert (when Richard Alston was resident choreographer) to create jousts between impeccable steps and bawdy attire and behavior. He appears intermittently in Who\u2019s Zoo? <\/em>Skulking about in a dark hoodie, reappearing in shorts instead of long pants, shucking the hoodie for a white tee-shirt, he might be a down-and-out revenant from his days as a reputed bad boy.\u00a0 At the end of the gallery where the musicians hang out, he and the marvelous Julie Cunningham (onetime dancer in Merce Cunningham\u2019s company) play a suggestive game with mirrored stools, swinging them back and forth between their legs. Lion-tamers minus the lions.<\/p>\n

So whose zoo is this and who\u2019re you calling a zoo?\u00a0 The rude, plaintive, boastful songs and the hovering, sneaking choreographer seem to belong to a different civilization from that of the dancers, the cool, patterned choreography, and the elegant designs created with light by Charles Atlas (a longtime Clark collaborator). It\u2019s up to us spectators\u2014seated on the floor or standing along one of the gallery\u2019s long sides (stools for the lucky few), turning our heads from side to side to scan the space\u2014 to make sense of this culture.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Who\u2019s Zoo? <\/em>borrows some of the movements and costuming from works that Clark created in London for the Tate Modern\u2019s Turbine Hall. The piece also shares a basic idea with its very well-received British predecessors: highly trained dancers alternate in the space with squads of untrained ones\u201448 in all (including various of the NYU-Tisch \u201cdance leaders\u201d who worked with them during the weeks when Clark\u2019s open rehearsals became an installation in the Whitney Biennial).<\/p>\n

Please don\u2019t feed the animals?\u00a0 The six main performers look as if food isn\u2019t one of their requirements. I don\u2019t just mean that they are exceedingly trim, but that hunger doesn\u2019t figure in the way they dance. They have a faintly inhuman poise, as if they were in the process of turning into another species.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Benjamin Warbis, inverted. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

Tall Harry Alexander and Benjamin Warbis enter hand in hand, stepping in precise unison. Shortly, Simon Williams appears, then Oxana Panchenko and Kate Coyne, then Cunningham. They\u2019re clad in identical gleaming high-necked, long-sleeved unitards (by Stevie Stewart and Clark) that shade from burnt orange to golden. Suddenly I find myself remembering what the dancers in Merce Cunningham\u2019s company looked like for a period during late 1970s and 1980s (Clark took a summer course at the Cunningham studio during those years). Most of them\u2014gorgeous though they were\u2014looked slightly stiff, and sober to the point of grimness\u2014as if someone had drilled \u201cthe movement is <\/em>the meaning\u201d into them.<\/p>\n

Clark\u2019s very beautiful, very accomplished dancers move with a similar detachment. The choreography calls for quick-footed stepping that shows off pointed feet and straight, probing legs. The performers pirouette, leap; their straight arms wheel or semaphore or thrust up in a V-shape. They seldom move their heads; changing directions, their legs rotate their bodies as single units. It\u2019s this last characteristic in particular that gives them a faintly robotic look. Later they prove that they can arch and bend their spines, angle their elbows to form chicken wings, lift their heads and raise a fist to their brows, twitch their hips to the side, raise and lower their shoulders, and lie in fetal positions. Still, it\u2019s a surprise when Williams first reclines on his side, head on hand, and watches the others for a few seconds.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s not a lot of contact between these people, especially in the first section. During a later part, the performers cluster, and there are brief passages of odd, intriguing partnering. The unison, coupled with their demeanor, implies cloning more than camaraderie. I can\u2019t quite grasp how (or if) the words of the songs influenced Clark. Early on, Cunningham places a hand on Alexander\u2019s head (he\u2019s kneeling) then moves on. In \u201cF.E.E.L.I.N.G.C.A.L.L.E.D.L.O.V.E,\u201d the singer says, \u201cAnd as I touch your shoulder tonight this room has become the centre of the entire universe.\u201d Coincidence?\u00a0 Certainly nothing in the choreography is this redolent of feeling. It\u2019s a a welcome moment when Cunningham, seated on the floor, gazes up, smiling slightly, at the man kiting around her and about to help her rise.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Oxana Panchenko in black and white. Photo: Paula Court<\/p><\/div>\n

The highly polished dancers are relieved intermittently by the well-rehearsed amateurs. Wearing assorted black clothes, the latter always perform spaced-out in unison squads. They have a simple, effective stepping-turning pattern that, repeated, moves them gradually across the floor. That\u2019s followed by a sequence of single decisive gestures. There are variants of these maneuvers. After each appearance, the people turn and exit with little, bouncy running steps. The precision with which they execute their moves on each heavy percussive beat of the music gives them the air of a peculiar army going through its drills with touching devotion.<\/p>\n

The single moment when the \u201cdancers\u201d race through the black-clad ranks is thrilling: an improbable rainbow streaking through a storm. Please let it happen again, you pray. Not a chance.<\/p>\n

The sight of dancers coming and going in this huge space provides its own excitement, and Atlas\u2019s light projections work a subtle, enhancing magic. In the beginning a horizontal blue-violet line streaks across the white wall. After a while, it expands to fill the surface, then shrinks down again. A pale green form widens and shifts to create the illusion of angled surfaces; it later \u201ccloses\u201d to look like a slim book standing on end, its binding toward us. At one point, a parallelogram of light appears at one end of the wall and as dancers, each in turn, slowly sidle in various ways around the entranceway, the light-shape slides along the wall, morphing and growing as it travels.<\/p>\n

For the second part of Who\u2019s Zoo<\/em>, the performers reappear in unitards that bisect or dissect their bodies with part-black this and part\u2013silver that. Near the end, Clark, brandishing a cane, disappears behind the curtain hiding a large windowed alcove and emerges in a skeleton suit for the group\u2019s bow. Not your usual rebirth. Or your usual ringmaster.<\/p>\n

The dancers look as if they should be performing to a spare piece of music like, say, Philip Glass\u2019s Night Train<\/em>, while the bands and Clark himself suggest a raunchy crowd running amok and getting teary as the night rolls on. Clark has masterminded Who\u2019s Zoo? <\/em>expertly, but I can\u2019t help wishing that the dancers, the non-dancers, and the music would strike sparks off one another in a formal sense, instead of simply co-existing in eye-filling, ear-assailing ways.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

an excerpt<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":700,"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":[199],"tags":[310,311],"class_list":{"0":"post-697","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-postmodern-views","8":"tag-michael-clark","9":"tag-relaxed-muscle","10":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697","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=697"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/697\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/700"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=697"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=697"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/dancebeat\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=697"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}