The Middletown Press (Middletown, CT)
Modern art, dance and cognitive science converge
NEWHAVEN>> There’s not a whole lot that average Americans really understand about contemporary art, I contend, but we continue to try.
Which brings us to the art installation fused with contemporary dance (also edgy at times) in the black-walled gallery space at the Yale School of Art, 32 Edgewood Ave., near the corner of Howe Street.
Breeze in before Dec. 4 for the free exhibit called “Perception Unfolds: Looking at Deborah Hay’s Dance,” and you can ponder an installation of four large translucent screens in a darkened space intermittently showing the projected images of solo dancers doing isolated movements (often stretches and near-poses) to a muffled music track. The effect is puzzling but not unsettling.
Hay, says a Yale release, has likened the experience of looking at contemporary dance to that of viewing contemporary art: Both can be challenging to new audiences and, since the 1960s, each has benefitted from collaboration and cross-fertilization. So Hay created a project that gives visitors a dynamic point of entry for both disciplines.
Sounds worthy of the old college try...
The exhibition made its debut at the Blanton Museum of Art at The University of Texas at Austin in February. Its presence at Yale, says Yale Art School Dean Robert Storr, signals the school’s “deepening engagement with movement and performance and its ongoing collaboration with Emily Coates, who directs Yale’s dance studies program.” Hay, meanwhile, is a former member of Merce Cunningham’s company and a founder of the Judson Dance Theater.
In the small anteroom just inside the Edgewood Avenue door to the gallery, there are some written materials and a video that provide clues to the art installation’s aims and its process. A poster of “The choreographer’s questions” notes that, “Hay poses unanswerable ‘What if?’ questions framed to excite the imagination of the person who is dancing.” OK, we’re following you. It quotes Hay saying, “The question is meant to inspire and engage the dancer in noticing the sensuality of the feedback from the question as it unfolds in his/her cellular body.”
And ... we’re confused. Maybe the ‘What if’ prompts for the
dancers will help explain it.
“In order to get out of the thinking mind,” the poster reads, “what if your whole body at once is your teacher?”
“What if every cell in your body had the ability to see time passing? HERE and gone, HERE and gone, HERE and gone?”
(For some of us nondancers, that might be expressed in a sneeze.)
Coates, at a press event recently for “Perception Unfolds,” said, “They’re very beautiful snapshots ... that try to get at perception.” She said creator Hay “has provided points of consciousness, points of attention for the dancer to mediate upon and respond to.”
As Yale’s publicity puts it, this experimental first work in an art gallery space for Hay grew out of a 3-year collaboration between the choreographer and Motion Bank, a speculative technology research project run by The (Germany-based) Forsythe Co. Hay slowly brought together an international team from disciplines such as dance, software development, music, architecture, videography and multimedia.
And yet the results are spare and quiet except for some low groans and musical notes coming out of wall speakers.
“You have the ability to walk around to choose your perception of the work, to choose your perspective,” said Coates, who compared the work toMerce Cunningham’s “democratic points of access” in her work.
Storr said the concurrent movement on screens makes sense in a modernist sense.
“One of the key ideas of early modernist music and composition was simultaneity, that all things were happening all at once ...” he said. “It’s a concept that you find in many, many cubist paintings. In fact, this is kind of a cubist installation, really. You’re seeing different aspects of the same dancers doing sometimes-same, sometimes-different motions.”
That’s right, he said “cubist.” While dance video is usually recordings of stage performances (or maybe electrodes on dancers tracing their motion), this is different, said Storr — “a visual artifact and a spatialization of a series of visual artifacts.”
The installation at the Yale School of Art is free and open to the public Tuesday–Sunday from noon to 6 p.m.
If you’re still not clear about “Perfection Unfolds,” the School of Art will have a related seminar Nov. 3 at 5 p.m. called “Reorganizing Ourselves” at 36 Edgewood Ave. in Room 204. The program includes two 60-minute lectures: “A Continuity of Discontinuity” by Hay and “See me if you can!” by philosopher Alva Noë from the University of California-Berkeley. The two will discuss connections between cognitive science, philosophy, aesthetics and dance. The program concludes with a salon-style discussion with Hay, Noë and audience members, facilitated by dance curator Michèle Steinwald.