Everywhere and all at once: Performa 07, the second installment of the new biennial, brought a staggering range of live events to venues large and small throughout New York City

Art in America, March, 2008

Fantome Afrique, also shown on three screens at BAM, was filmed in Burkina Faso and begins and ends in its capital, Ouagadougou, the center of the film industry in Africa. There is a deep blue cast to these framing scenes, which introduce the dancer Stephen Galloway (of William Forsythe's former company, Ballet Frankfurt) as a shamanistic figure wielding what looks like a light baton. But most of Fantome Afrique occurs in the searing golden light of the desert. Sometimes overtaken by clouds of dust, a half-built tower of fantastic shape and proportion is a recurring motif, and Galloway occasionally moves, wraithlike, through its circular and vaguely sinister corridors. There are brief snippets of vintage film and some tribal drumming, along with other music directed and recorded by Paul Gladstone Reid, but this segment of "Cast No Shadow" had no live dancers, making its connection to performance more than a little strained.

The action of Small Boats, the final segment, spans Africa and Europe (Sicily, to be precise)--a bridge that helped link, at least as a metaphor, the two previous projects. More important is that its deeper integration of dance and film, which was shown on a single, stage-wide screen, lent a degree of coherence to the evening as a whole. Small Boats opened with images of a kind of dinghy graveyard, the bright light and cheerful colors of the beat-up little vessels mitigating--or, in a less sympathetic reading, undermining--the bleakness of the subject at hand: the efforts of North Africans to gain entry to Italy by an improvised crossing of the Mediterranean that often ends tragically.

The emigrants' plight was evoked obliquely. Shots of tired and thirsty-looking Africans shipboard alternate with footage filmed on the chalk-white "Turkish Steps" (a natural shoreline formation) at Agrigento; at the touristy seaside town of Scopello; and at the opulent if strange Palazzo Gangi in Palermo, where Luchino Visconti famously made The Leopard (1963). As the imagery on the screen--a transparent scrim--split and dissolved, six live dancers became visible behind. In one particularly effective passage, the palace steps, up and down which filmed dancers tumbled, became bars of light on the stage floor and a framework for an anguished solo performance.

The most lyrical sequence came near the end, when the dancers climbed onto enormous nets that descended from the flies and struggled up the ropes, only to be illusionistically submerged by floods washing across the screen; as the water rose, the dancers came to seem like helpless, caught fish (the filmed imagery that follows, of fully clothed figures shot underwater, was the unfortunately literal conclusion). Less graceful, and more unsettling in several ways, was a (filmed) scene of dead bodies laid out on the beach, covered loosely with shiny metal foil as if for tanning, or roasting, while tourists strolled nearby. The reference, Julien said in an interview in Bomb magazine, was to a newspaper photograph. In Julien's hands, the image teeters disturbingly, and symptomatically, between outrage and enigma.