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Photo: Benjamin Nicholas |
ECLIPSE begins with a new space and unfolds as a conversation. The first proposition: the Brooklyn Academy of Music invites Jonah Bokaer to create the inaugural performance at BAM Fisher, a small-scale theater set to open in 2012. Bokaer responds by proposing a collaboration with Anthony McCall, who in turn proposes an installation consisting of 36 lights arranged in a grid. Bokaer choreographs movement in response to McCall’s design, the latter adds sound—a projector, a train, a helicopter—and eventually the dancers’ work begins, their movements cued by the intricate pattern of timed illumination.
Where you sit determines what you see of ECLIPSE. True for
any performance viewed by a seated audience, here the perspectival character of
perception is paramount. The quadrafrontal performance space and the grid of
lights, torqued 90 degrees and tilted relative to the floor, establish
radically different views depending on vantage point. Seated at one corner, the
immediate field of vision is dominated by hanging bulbs that the dancers navigate
like an obstacle course. Looking from this side, the lines of lights gradually
rise and lengthen till they reach a center row of six bulbs hanging six feet
from the ground. Each subsequent row is one bulb shorter and one foot higher,
topping out with a single bulb at 12 feet. For the spectator seated on that
side, meanwhile, the foreground view is of dancers moving in an open space, the
lights forming a canopy above them that gradually descends in ordered lines,
each a foot lower and a bulb longer than the last, till the midpoint, where the
lights dangle just over the dancers’ heads, suggesting Vitruvian proportion. Further
back—upstage, as it were, from that point of view—one sees the dancers weaving
between the hanging bulbs. In this complex space, an experiment in what McCall
has referred to as “exploded cinema,” the various elements—patterns of lights,
a spectral soundtrack evoking the life of the city and the history of film, bodies
composed for close ups and long shots—register differently from each position
around the square.
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Photo of Jonah Bokaer by Benjamin Nicholas |
Relentless, the desire for order manifest in this piece: the
uncompromising linearity of the grid, the meticulous precision of movement and
light and sound. Nothing, it seems, is left to chance. Still, there is the
uncontrollable mystery, the mess of flesh and blood in live performance, the
breathing audience, the community of individuals together in a given space, for
a given time. In its single hour, ECLIPSE makes legible that mystery.
Thomas Bartscherer teaches in literature, philosophy, and classics at Bard College and is the director of Bard's Language and Thinking Program.
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