-- By Tom Phillips
 |
| Kolonial: Stefanie Batten Bland |
America is starting
to emerge from 14 months of viral living, but like all traumas, this pandemic
year will live on in mind and body. Reams of research and acres of art will
record how we lived and died with the coronavirus, and how it changed us. Ahead of the game, the Baryshnikov Arts
Center of New York is offering the first fruits of an ugly season --- a
piece created and performed during the pandemic, under medically-prescribed COVID
health and safety protocols.
Choreographer
Stefanie Batten Bland assembled half a dozen dancers in BAC’s Jerome Robbins
Theater, in an installation by Conrad Quesen. They begin the drama in separate plastic bubbles, close enough to see each other but barred from touching. In a recorded introduction, Bland says Kolonial
is about isolation, being on display, voyeurism, the desire to
touch; finding ways to be with others, and then finding why we can’t be. The 20-minute
video performance captures the recurring misery of pandemic life, its constant
approach and avoidance of human contact, its multiple barriers of plastic.
The dancers
are clothed in rags, their bodies streaked with dirt. They scuffle in their bubbles
until their locked-up energy turns into vibrations, spasms, paroxysms, seizures. The booming, growling sound score by Grant
Cutler evokes the gnashing of teeth.
Halfway
through the video, the color scheme changes from a ghastly blue and white to a
warm yellow and brown – the colors of flesh. And the participants rip through
the walls for what looks like to our freaked-out eyes like an orgy – they
actually touch, and climb on each other to make a people pile. They end up in something like a smoldering fire
zone, standing around unmasked and too close for comfort, but not looking at
each other, disengaged, waiting.
Kolonial was recorded in December 2020, during
the loneliest of holiday seasons. The program
says the installation was based on colonial exposition parks of the 19th
and 20th centuries, but that reference is not clearly
developed. It looked to me more like a
pandemic anxiety attack inside an environmental disaster area. The piece stands as an artifact of a sick era
in our present century, a trial by ordeal with a verdict yet to come.
The first of
three Digital Spring productions from BAC, Kolonial is being streamed free
on demand through May 17 at www.bacnyc.org.
Photo by Maria Baranova
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