“Am I missing something here?” is a question many dance performances provoke. In my mind, this thought often has an uneasy tone, because I think my job as a critic is to make sure I don’t miss it as much as possible. when I attended the New York premiere of “Wired” at the Shed by Kinetic Light On Thursday, that question got especially loud in my head. But even more unusual is the stark clarity of the answer.Me was something is missing on purpose.
That’s because Kinetic Light, a disabled art collective whose work is made by and for disabled people, has a very thoughtful and thorough ethic and aesthetic of access. This doesn’t make her one way of experiencing work a priority. No one can experience it in all its aspects.
What I knew I was missing was the audio commentary of the performance. Kinetic Light uses an application called Audimance, which focuses on increasing choice and control for ensembles, allowing users to choose from over seven different tracks of audio commentary for “Wired” and switch between them at will. can be mixed.
Audimance isn’t for people with perfect eyesight like me, but before the show I asked if I could try it out. The company generously allowed me to listen to the audio commentary of one section of hers.
Actually, it was familiar to me because I always try to put dance into words. One track sounded like a phrase scribbled in a notebook in the dark. Others were closer to the sophisticated product of the review, combining physical description with a sting of interpretation. It was a romantic and poetic monologue ( Lia Lakshmi Piepuzna Samarasingha), which evokes the thoughts and feelings of the dancers more than their movements: “I make shock erotic.”
Listening to descriptions of dances I hadn’t seen yet reminded me of how much information each moment of the dance contained and how many entry points there were. (One track focuses solely on lighting, which I tend to treat in brackets.) Various tracks dealing with the same section reveal the subjectivity inherent in the audience’s experience, especially with regard to emotion and meaning. made more prominent. Mixing them was like listening to your dinner companion while paying attention to the conversation at the next table.
When I finally watched “Wired,” I sometimes missed this voice or wondered what it was saying. Because — here’s where what I do makes a big difference: Evaluation — my experience with this job has been a lot and not enough.
“Wired” is centered around two competing metaphors that intersect. Three performers who are also choreographers use cables, rigging and pulleys to float and hover in the company’s first aerial work. Alice Shepard and Laurel Lawson are mostly in wheelchairs, and Jeron Herrmann is on his own. But “Wired” also talks about the history and relevance of barbed wire.
The 85 minute piece is divided into many short sections. It feels like a series of exciting experiments, but frustratingly like a series of sketches. Many segments appear amorphous, squeezing out variations from already squeezed ideas, with arbitrary or cryptic exits and endings. Within each section, the strongest moments are separated by spaces, like thorns with no connecting wires.
What inspired “Wired” Melvin Edwards’ barbed wire sculptureand emulates a balance between abstraction and social or political resonance. Barbed wire is a wire as in the drawing, But it also draws blood. But maintaining that balance is trickier in the choreography and wobble of “Wired” due to time and body.
It begins with Shepard and Lawson floating in the air in wheelchairs, floating and spinning like astronauts in low gravity. The wires holding them and those holding them intersect aesthetically, but when the performers grab each other and let go, the wires (along with gravity) also pull them apart: an abstraction, a human drama.
After two sections, Shepard and Lawson perform another duet, with Lawson, who is white, continuing to pull the hair of Shepard, who is multiracial and black. After that, Shepard not only flies more freely, but also flails, falling in a beautiful slow-motion arc. is this an escape?
The image is very vague as Shepard is completely out of control. Her ascent and descent depend on the person operating the rigging, seated at a table visible to the audience. That tension returns later in Sisyphian’s solo, where Shepard continues to crawl toward the corner and pull back to the center.
But many other sections just rotate in the air. And some of the most effective bits aren’t airborne at all. At the end of Act 1, the three performers kneel in a projected box of light (by Michael Marg), hooded and adorned with barbed wire, sinking and rising as if in prayer. The meaning here is clear enough, like when Heron used barbed wire to whip the image of the American flag projected onto the floor.
Too much content and too little development for me. (Even the music, which alternates between Liahn Mitchell’s R&B-tinged hums and Iris Ni Liang’s modernist piano, wouldn’t make up its mind.)
What I found most successful and inspiring was the inclusive atmosphere and the audience it attracted. It was lively and festive with more wheelchair users than I had seen before at a dance show. When I explained that I was using the device for , the information was greeted with cheers. I’m sure a lot of people who were cheering at the time and while bowing got more out of the show than I did. I was happy to be among them.
Wired
Shed, until tomorrow at theshed.org.