{"id":542,"date":"2008-06-02T01:30:06","date_gmt":"2008-06-02T08:30:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp\/2008\/06\/julian_barnetts_sound_memory_a\/"},"modified":"2008-06-02T01:30:06","modified_gmt":"2008-06-02T08:30:06","slug":"julian_barnetts_sound_memory_a","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/2008\/06\/julian_barnetts_sound_memory_a.html","title":{"rendered":"Julian Barnett’s “Sound Memory” and other odes to retro habits at La Mama Moves"},"content":{"rendered":"

La Mama is a casual
\nkind of place. I’ve shown up to review a dance version of “Medusa” without anyone
\nmentioning that there would be lots of talking–in Japanese. Or, a couple of Sundays
\nago, only half the advertised performers actually performed. The other half had
\ngone the day before. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

This easy spirit is
\nperfect for the La Mama Moves festival, which just finished up (sorry!) its
\nglorious three weeks. The festival was experimental in the root sense: artists
\ngoofing around.  <\/span> <\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

On the Mavericks in
\nMotion program on May 18, the pieces made especially for the occasion–and probably
\nin short time–were dopey, gross, brawling, oozy, highly allusive, and very much
\nof the moment. (Heather Olson’s solo, excerpted from her Dance Theater Workshop
\npremiere in March, “Curious Awake Not Possible,” was naturally more polished. I
\ndon’t know what I would have thought of the drama as a whole, but this part,
\nwith the always-splendid Olson doing the dancing, possessed a compelling oddness
\nand clarity.) <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Aaron Draper’s
\n“Fruitshake Polaroid” calls to mind food commercials–all of them–where food fills
\nin for some other appetite. A man and woman dance, romance, and stuff their
\nfaces with Ho-Hos. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

You may say, okay,
\nI get how that’s gross, oozy, and allusive, but new<\/i>? The references in the other dances aren’t of recent vintage, either: not the psychedelic
\nlight shows or the grunge spirit that cinematographer Ray Roy’s “Red Light
\nSpecial” brings to mind, nor the cassette tapes featured prominently in Julian Barnett’s “Sound
\nMemory.” But what does<\/i> feel current is the very plenitude of retro allusions–the ease with which the choreographers borrow from the past.  <\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

“Red Light Special”
\nsets the scene with a video screen behind the dancers multiplying them
\ntenfold in red and green as they move sluggishly in the flesh. It comes into its own when pasty-faced
\nRoy, in boxer shorts, and his two lady companions, in hoodies and
\nunderpants, plunk down in a row of institutional metal folding chairs and spread
\ntheir legs, subway style.
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Roy is getting off in a clammy, crackhead way on the
\nnearness of them, while they, looking slovenly and hung over, are maintaining a
\nheavy-lidded glumness, like he found them that day at the Laundromat after
\nsomeone had stolen their clothes. If the American Apparel models let some natural
\nlight into their fluorescent cubes, it might look like this. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

As I’ve complained on Foot more than once about the lack of movement invention among
\nyoungish choreographers, I should say that they are <\/i>keen on the social realm. My favorite example on Sunday–the whole
\nyear, even–was Julian Barnett’s “Sound Memory (work in progress).”  <\/span><\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

\"7_img1530.jpg\"<\/a><\/font><\/span><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The piece gives off
\nsuch light in its unfinished state that you worry it might lose more than it
\ngains by being completed. (Then–nature abhorring a vacuum–you figure out what
\nmight be gained and stop worrying.)<\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The dance begins in the pitch black. Someone empties a box of cassette tapes onto the floor and scoots them
\none by one across the space. It turns out that cassettes dropped and scattered make
\na sound so distinct that you can identify it in the dark. <\/span>“Sound  Memory” calls up many things that have
\nlain in the dark. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

You may only remember
\na song’s words and tune after it begins, but you usually know in advance how it will
\nmake you feel. It’s as if the song were unwinding from you as much as from the
\ntape: a reverse d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu, the song on tape imagined while the song in
\nyou is real. Sometimes the experience is inverted: you realize you’ve forgotten how
\nmuch pleasure a song has given, over and over again. For weeks or months or
\nyears while you were thinking of other things, it held that pleasure, like someone
\nholding a place for you in line. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

That mix of certainty
\nand anticipation–everything will proceed in order, and you will have to, you
\nwill get to, <\/span>take it bit by bit–is
\nspecific to tape-playing. With an iPod or even with a record player (God
\nforbid!), no one ever has to wait. And with an iPod, you can choose not only a
\nparticular tune but even randomness. (What kind of randomness is it, anyway, if
\nyou get to choose it?) Tape-playing has us wait for what we can’t quite
\nremember until it arrives. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

“Sound Memory” gets
\nat this boredom and relief, private memory and collective ritual, by very simple
\nmeans. Three dancers (Barnett, Patrick Ferreri, and Hanna Kivioja) take turns
\npicking cassettes off the floor, stuffing them into their individual boom boxes,
\nand dancing alone to the song. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Years ago, these songs spent months in heavy rotation. Most of them are like the Counting
\nCrows’ “Mister Jones”: dumb lyrics (“…and I felt so symbolic yesterday”) and a dumb yet
\ncatchy beat. The dancer occasionally seems to be responding to the lyrics. More
\noften, the song is only a point of departure–departed from so long ago,
\nno one could possibly follow the path back. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Whenever someone says
\na dance is left open to our imaginations, I’m pretty sure I won’t like it. Doesn’t
\nall dance do that? So what does it mean to announce it? “Sound Memory” doesn’t
\nleave the dance open to our imagination, it explores what an imagination does
\nwith what gets handed to it. The encodedness of this dancing is funny and to
\nthe point. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The dances to the individual
\nsongs could have been more distinct from person to person and song to song. My
\nfriend Elaine hoped Barnett would deploy a quasi-Cunninghamesque method as he
\nproceeded: make a bunch of short dances, some of them to specific songs and
\nsome of them randomly assigned a song. The dancers then have this enormous
\nrepertory of dances in their heads–as we have song memories in ours–which they
\ncall up on the instant when a tape is picked off the floor. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

What was<\/i> amazing and rare was the texture–the
\nway the dance fell in and out of formality. Sometimes it was antitheatrical: the
\ndancer picking up a tape and plunking it in the player in a thoroughly
\npedestrian way, or losing the thread of his improvisation midway and just diddling around. And
\nsometimes 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
\nforth like this, it means the choreographer doesn’t know what he’s doing. Here,
\nit felt like listening to tapes: sometimes you’re just listening and sometimes
\nyou’re remembering. Sometimes it’s in real time and sometimes it has the smooth patina of dream-memory. <\/span>“Sound Memory (work in
\nprogress)” is the raw and the cooked together. 
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


<\/font><\/p>\n

Look for Julian Barnett’s “Sound Memory” at Danspace Project at St. Mark’s Church in March.
<\/font><\/p>\n

****** <\/o:p>
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

“Sound Memory” made me think of all sorts of mental habits that current technology has made
\nobsolete. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

When you called someone
\nbefore there were answering machines, you imagined the person
\nwalking 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
\nempty house and no one hearing the ring except maybe the dog, if he was home. And
\nwhat did it mean to him<\/i>? <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Then there was
\nbeing called–the mystery of it. You had no idea who it might be, and you had time to
\nthink about it. Nothing was going to happen if you didn’t answer on the fourth
\nring except maybe the person would hang up. There was no answering machine to make
\nyou feel like a cheat. If you didn’t want to answer, you could count the rings
\nand extrapolate how much this person really wanted to talk to you (or maybe your sister, mother, father, or brother.)
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

In the second house
\nI grew up in, people didn’t call much, though they did come by–my mother’s
\nfriends and the enticing friends of the artist who lived in our basement.
\n<\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The basement arrangement
\nwas supposed to be temporary–the artist moved in because his girlfriend, who lived
\nnext door, had dumped him. But he was there for years, until another girlfriend
\ntook him in. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The basement, which
\nmainly consisted of a carport, had no windows. When he wanted outside light, he’d
\nopen the carport door–his front door–and hang out in the driveway, him and his
\npaint-speckled friends. <\/span>The subject of
\nhis paintings, were, appropriately, cars. Big cars, little cars, red cars, blue
\ncars. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

When he got drunk,
\nhe 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
\ndialing before the ringing began. <\/o:p><\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

My father didn’t
\nlive with us, so he was the person I most looked forward to hearing from. For a
\nyear after he died, when the phone would ring I’d be halfway through anticipating
\nit was him before I remembered it couldn’t be.
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

Then I moved away to
\ncollege, and there was nowhere to anchor that tense, achy hope to.
<\/span><\/font><\/p>\n

The phone and the
\nhome and the hope were of a piece for me, but I wonder whether in this evermore
\nportable world the imagination binds itself more and more loosely to places and things. <\/span><\/font><\/p>\n


<\/font><\/p>\n


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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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"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":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-542","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-main","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=542"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/542\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=542"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=542"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/foot\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=542"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}