Visual artist and choreographer Beau Bully Lee’s performance in Madison Square Park, “Shadow of the Sea,” has a poetic title. It derives from the work of Symbolist poet Paul Valéry, and is recited in French by Lee at the end of what she calls a “dance poem.”
But to Valerie in the early 20th century, to Lee today, it was an image of waves with darker shades suggestive of global warming and rising sea levels.
Her work, which the Kitchen and Madison Square Park Conservancy presents on select weeknights, is based on the study of maps that predict Manhattan’s future coastline. It is a dialogue with Christina Iglesias’ current exhibition “Landscape and Memory” in the park. It’s a series of pools cut into the lawn that haunts the creek that once ran through it.
Lee explains all this. her extensive program notes: ideas for each section or “stanza”, her translations from French and Korean, experiences with sea turtles. But between the sophistication of this background information and the rudimentary, amateur quality of the performance itself, a huge chasm looms.
The Kitchen has a reputation for avant-garde art. Lee’s choreography is surprisingly mundane, arranging several positions borrowed from ballet without any special imagination or skill. Her four dancers who join her include Pro (Caitlin Scranton, Bria Her Bacon). And who is the choreographer? Sometimes I forget my steps.
I turned to the program notes and gleaned that the frequent X-arms allude to a gesture of protest that Lee extends to “all oppressed living beings.” I had to. A glorified version of her, stripped of political power, looks like part of a low-impact exercise class in the park. I had to read that it was like a pun on “death” or “natural death”.
Some, if not considerable sadness, about the exploitation of the planet fills the piece, mostly through discordant musical choices.” , there was no dance vocabulary to express the idea. I couldn’t help but be distracted by the squirrels, mice and fallen leaves in the park.
And maybe it’s kind of a success. The first section of the work, “Brutal Meditation,” is a walk from the East or Hudson River. I took the West Side Pass, catching up with Lee and Kara Her McManus briskly following a route from Pier 64 through an area predicted to be submerged in the next 50 or 100 years. It’s one thing to look at a map and one to walk knowing that the surrounding streets may share the fate of the creek buried in the ruins of Madison Square Park. (Watch out, the David Zwirner Gallery on West 20th Street.) Even if Lee’s dancing isn’t very noteworthy, at least draw attention to what is.
bo bully lee
Madison Square Park through October 20th. thekitchen.org.