Art on stage - collaborations between visual artists and performers

Art in America, Sept, 1997 by Janet Koplos

Metallic polygons dangling from strings in the main hall of a historic building at the Snug Harbor Cultural Center on Staten Island; dancers in unitards covered with the words "I want" performing in the Grand Lobby of the Brooklyn Museum; strips of red cloth -- "blood ties" -- being knotted together by audience members in the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Majestic Theater: these disparate occurrences marked radically different productions last fall by three visual artists -- Jene Highstein, Rona Pondick and Albert Chong -- who created performance works in the second year of BAM's "Artists in Action" program.

In this experimental project, which will conclude this fall, BAM invites visual artists to create a production of some sort by collaborating with performers of their choice. An essay in this year's program magazine noted that visual artists and performing artists do not conceptualize performance space or time in the same way. BAM is apparently curious about what this different perspective might mean on stage. For the artists themselves, the program can present an opportunity to express a favorite theme or preoccupation in a new way and to explore the possibilities of collaboration. This season's three "Artists in Action" productions reflected the nature of the artists' own work, the performance medium they selected, and the type and degree of collaboration they chose.

First on the boards was Flatland: A Romance of W-many Dimensions, initiated by the sculptor Jene Highstein and presented at Snug Harbor. Highstein, a maker of organic minimalistic volumes, worked with the independent theater artist Hanne Tierney to produce a piece in her style of "abstract" or actorless theater about a world with only two dimensions -- ironically, a world in which Highstein's own profession could not exist. Flatland is based on an 1883 story of the same title written by Edwin A. Abbott, a British schoolmaster. It has been used to illustrate principles in physics and to explain the difficulty of understanding a fourth dimension, but it is also a satire about a land where social classes are based on plane geometry, where working men are triangles, gentlemen are squares and the priestly class is circular. women are straight lines (rods). The protagonist, a square, encounters a sphere and discovers the world of three dimensions, but to carry the news back to Flatland is heresy, and he is imprisoned.

The story was narrated in part by Tierney, who wore a microphone as she manipulated a bank of cords connected to a variety of geometric shapes (made primarily of foamcore and aluminum) scattered on the floor of the hall. She worked in full view of an audience seated in bleachers at both ends of the rectangular space. Highstein's resonant baritone was heard from offstage, along with two taped voices and taped, studio-produced music. The humor, animation and expression one could read into the performance came not from the storytelling, which was simple and declarative to the point of irony; the unhurried sentences established a soothing tone and pace. Instead, the life of the tale was conveyed by various movements of the geometric shapes in space. They stated, rose and fell quickly or in slow motion, as controlled by Tierney's skillfull strings. It was a smooth performance, marred only by a first-night mishap: a broken cord in the last moments required that the geometric structure imprisoning the protagonist be set in place by hand.

Highstein essentially had to work against the hall's architectural features to make a performance space. He covered the walls with drapery and the floor with padded cloth to conceal the ornate turn-of-the-century moldings and parquetry. Nevertheless, there were at least two advantages to this setting. One was the very oddness of walking into a known exhibition space of distinctive detailing and seeing it masked, which heightened a viewer's spatial sense. The other was that at the moment in the story when the narrator discovers the sphere, lights came up on the balconies above the audience, as if the building itself had blossomed into another dimension.

Tierney's metier was more apparent than Highstein's in the production of Flatland. Her installation Walt Whitman's America, displayed in a Snug Harbor gallery, showed her concept of "abstract theater": it consisted of taped narration, evocative lighting, and costumes treated as objects and rigged up to allow simple mechanized movement. Several Highstein sculptures from the '90s were also on view in the Snug Harbor galleries; these involved texture and, of course, volumetric form, neither of which figured in Flatland except in the momentary appearance of the sphere. The sphere specifically recalled several lamplike bamboo forms covered with iridescent silk (in orange, brown, green and purple) that Highstein created in cooperation with Philadelphia's Fabric Workshop. Moreover, the imposing appearance of the sphere in the two-dimensional world of Flatland was similar to the intimidating, space-swallowing presence of huge, curving, floor-to-ceiling concrete volumes which he built in two of Snug Harbor's galleries after the performance run of Flatland ended.