The Dance a Coup Couldn't Cancel

US Patriots at the Pyramids 

The White House’s first wave of assaults on government-funded programs left many defunct or disabled. But at least one group managed to carry out its plans, without federal funds and in defiance of an order to stop. These intrepid and inspired artists are the performers of Time Lapse Dance, led by New York choreographer Jody Sperling (center, above).

With a grant from the US Embassy in Cairo, the company spent three years planning a tour--- to perform for children and young people at Egypt’s Hakawy International Arts Festival. On Sunday, January 26th, the day before they were to depart, Sperling woke up to a message from the State Department: her grant was terminated and she must stop the program immediately.  It was a short phone call, she says. She was in shock.  The costumes were all packed, the plane tickets purchased.  She began a frantic round of fund-raising, and re-negotiating contracts with her Egyptian hosts.  “They can’t stop us from going,” she said.  Long story short: the cancelled tour went on. 

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. 

Junk Dances 2020

"Plastic Harvest" 
Jody Sperling/Time Lapse Dance 
The Center at West Park, New York
Streamed Live December 15, 2020

By Tom Phillips 
-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips 

Anika Hunter in "Plastic Harvest" 

In the early 1960s, choreographer Murray Louis took a ride up the escalator at Macy’s, the world’s largest store.

 ''I looked at rooms and rooms .. waves of coats and shirts,'' he told the New York Times. ''I thought, 'Who buys this?' And suddenly I had an image of excess as a theme.''  Shortly after, Louis attended a country auction where he bought a bundle of old umbrellas. He opened them up: ''They were all completely eaten away. It was wonderful.”  He had one thought: “It all turns to junk.”  

Out of this, in 1964 Louis and Phyllis Lamhut made a wonderful duet, set in an alley that steadily filled up with the detritus of a shopping spree – heaps and piles of paper bags, filled with goods destined to decay and disintegrate.  They called it “Junk Dances.”  Fast forward to 2020, and choreographer Jody Sperling is on the Down escalator, contemplating the end times of our long national shopping spree.  She calls it "Plastic Harvest." 

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Today a tsunami of accumulated junk is filling up the whole earth.  And instead of paper bags full of ephemeral objects, we have mountains of plastic bags, filled with plastic products that will not decay or go away.  In 1964 our consumer products all turned to junk.  Today they start out as junk, and turn to toxic waste.      

“Plastic Harvest” is a Covid-era virtual work in progress, a video featuring four dancers in costumes fashioned from plastic bags.  Anika Hunter opens in a tub, taking a bubble bath in a sea of crackling plastic.  As she periodically disappeared under the surface, I thought of the warnings on some bags – danger of suffocation.  Hunter begins and ends her bath reading a book – “So You Want to Talk about Race.”  It’s a crisis, for sure, but not the one that’s immediately surrounding her.  Like the American consumer she appears unconcerned, even as she slips under the waves. 

Maki Kitahara follows in a wide-sleeved kimono made of bags tied and hanging from her outstretched arms as if from a clothesline.  This too is a disappearing act, through a trick of Sperling’s camera that shoots her in a split-screen mirror image.  Turning toward the center she disappears, turning outward she splits into two.  An identity crisis – is it a person, two persons, plastic, or nothing at all? 

Andrea Pugliese-Trager

The grand finale is a whirling balletic folk dance in swirling tutus and puffed plastic sleeves, intercut between Frances Barker on a suburban street and Andrea Pugliese-Trager in New York.  Both wind up crossing an intersection – Pugliese-Trager through a construction zone, Barker past a Stop sign into a weed-strewn vacant lot.  

Obviously, more questions than answers in this work-in-progress, but that’s as it should be.  The camera work is sharp and the split-screens stunning.  It’s all kept driving by Matthew Burtner’s repetitive score, which sounds like the infernal combustion of some satanic micro-mill.   

Besides the dancers, the most striking visual was the unheeded sign that said STOP.   Hey, it's not too late… 

-- Copyright 2020 by Tom Phillips                                 

Junk Dances, 1964

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