Rites of Spring

-- By Tom Phillips  

Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 

One problem in dealing with the world’s environmental crisis is that it’s composed of so many interrelated problems, most of them difficult to picture. Science does a lousy job of dramatizing climate change – so by the time people are forced to recognize it, their homes may be gone and their lives in danger.  And so it falls to the arts to show what business-as-usual is doing to us.  And Earth Day is an annual opportunity to seize the outdoor stage. 

Enter Jody Sperling and her Time Lapse dancers with what has become a rite of spring – a company clothed, covered, festooned, floating and in danger of choking in plastic bags, leaping and whirling in the streets of Manhattan’s Upper West Side.  Never mind that plastic shopping bags were outlawed in New York this year.  They are still everywhere, and the most egregious form of plastic – the afterlife of oil, the cheap luxury which has already stained the earth and threatens to inundate it. 

Down-to-earth as a Morris team and eerie as Extraterrestrials, a trio of bag-women danced uphill from Riverside Drive to Broadway during a Saturday street fair on 103rd.  They were trailed by a gang of delighted children – which alarmed some grownups, concerned that the kids didn't understand plastic is poison.  But that is exactly the point – that people don’t get it, that we dump this poison daily into earth, sky, and sea – and it even looks pretty if you don’t look too closely.  

"Wake up and Smell the Coffee" 

The charm of plastic is often well hidden.  Customers think their take-out coffee cups are paper, but most are lined and capped with plastic, and tens of billions are thrown out each year.  New York's Butoh queen Vangeline sent her company out dumpster-diving four years ago. and they brought back enough used cups to cover the stage at the Triskelion Arts Center in Brooklyn.  For this pandemic year, they streamed their 2017 production of "Wake up and Smell the Coffee," and it was still fresh enough to give you the jitters. The climax was a caffeine-fueled picnic brawl involving the whole company, followed by the death of one dancer and a ceremonial cleanup.  The company ended with black garbage bags stuffed with dirty cups balanced on their heads.  Want a refill on that?    

Back at the street fair, another all-female troupe improvised a healing ceremony for the waning days of the pandemic.  Jill Sigman and her dancers began in a tight circle, then broke up into individual  bubbles.  They came back together slowly and hesitantly, exploring each other's auras before they finally dared to touch.  "Healing/trying" captured these times, both the pain of isolation and the effort it takes to emerge. 

-- Copyright 2021 by Tom Phillips
Vangeline Theater photo by Michael Blase