the urgent artist

Re-posted with permission so I could share it with all of you, here are thoughts from Joshua Bastian Cole:

HOW I GOT INTO PURGATORY:
A Review of 90 Ways to Wake from Drowning
By Joshua Bastian Cole

I was not prepared for what I witnessed at the premiere of 24 year old choreographer, Sarah A.O. Rosner’s highly ambitious full-length theatrical (dare I say dramatic) dance piece titled 90 Ways to Wake from Drowning, which opened at the Joyce SoHo on July 30, 2010.

My own, only slightly older eye, at first glance did hastily and scornfully judge the work as immature, by which I mean that I found the show’s concept juvenile and even offensive. The first of the show’s two preview trailers highlights terrific car crashes. The second trailer cinematically, in a linear narrative, displays a sorority party wherein the protagonist’s ex-boyfriend inspires a self-destructive outburst reminiscent of a temper tantrum. Rosner intentionally ties these two disparate images together for the work at large, comparing the broken heart of a party girl to a car wreck, or what Rosner herself likes to call “a hot mess.”

This idea concerned me on two, clearly delineated levels. First, I don’t care about a hot mess drunk girl… in fact, nobody does. She usually pukes on herself and then the campus designated driver organization will get her back to her dorm. I’ve only seen this story told interestingly one time: Bret Easton Ellis’ The Rules of Attraction, wherein the point of the story is that there IS no story. Those people are empty, and if that is what you are saying, then you are saying something. There is nothing else to say.

My second concern was that of the car crashes. I found the imagery startling, shocking, and potentially triggering to survivors of that kind of physical trauma. I asked if Rosner had been in a car crash, which in that case, would have been a fascinating inspiration for survivor art. Thankfully, although also disappointingly, she has only been rear-ended. There was some hint of theft or of co-opting that I was feeling about this, although I have not been in a car crash either. In pointing this out to Rosner, she responded that she was aware of this as problematic, but she still found car crashes inspiring and the violence of it, sexy. Being aware of oneself as having the privilege of not being a victim does not make it any less problematic. I guess I just didn’t feel it was her story to tell, and there is nothing sexy about violence. At the same time, however, I was conflicted on this point, because I do acknowledge the tragic grace in bodies being jarred and hurled through space. We’ve all seen the images of crash test dummies bouncing around in slow motion, and who of us can take our eyes off of it?

I prepared myself to watch re-enactments of bodies flying in awkward pained bundles. I prepared myself to watch video of sedan-sized infernos. I was not prepared for what it was that I saw in 90 Ways to Wake from Drowning.

I saw love stories. I saw loneliness. I saw oppression and violence and fear and confusion. I also saw Rosner not only as a choreographer, but as a storyteller. Rosner believes this work to be post-modern, but I’m not sure how post-modern a story with characters, relationships, a beginning, middle, and an end really is. Post-modernism is a reaction to composition and presentation, two of the strongest elements of Rosner’s work. I think its lack of post-modernity in exchange for classic storytelling is not only what made it cohesive; it’s also why I liked it. Coming from a background in theatre, I appreciate character development, conflicts, and climaxes. What I’ve seen a lot of in post-modern dance is void. Emptiness. Non-movement. Rosner’s work was full of movement, changing energies, emotions. Whether she knew she was doing this or not, she took the post-modern concept of void and turned it on its head, so that the piece itself thrust her characters into purgatory. As opposed to dragging an audience into a void, we were instead watching a bunch of wandering souls traverse an unstable changing landscape of time where situations repeated, but were never quite the same. The clearest example of this process is demonstrated by the two dominant character dancers, Ilona Bito and Rowan Magee. Magee incites the repetition of story points as he runs frightened and frenzied onto the stage from outside, behind the audience. It is difficult not to see the relationship from Bito to Magee as maternal at this point. Although, at other points, their relationship is less clearly defined.

This brings me to a strength in 90 Ways: the sharply defined creation of chemistry. Not only would I describe the work as cohesive, but so too is the bond between the dancers themselves. This group worked as a company, and the chemistry between partners was palpable. The energy flowing between bodies was thick, for example between the duet of Bito and Jon Cooper. Cooper follows Bito like a basketball player guarding a basket: closely, intimately, mimicking her moves in opposition and negative space, taking up space where she does not. It was almost as if they were dancing through water, and I wonder now if that is where the allusion to drowning comes from in the title. The other strong pairing was Cristina Jasen and Cory Antiel. The two pantomime and vocalize a daily routine of grocery shopping as a married couple. Developing them as a married couple running errands makes their duet all the more tragic as we understand them to be in an everyday car crash. This segment may also serve to establish the scene opening the show, of Jasen being cast into purgatory from an unexplained cause.
Several dancers have solos, which breaks up the structure of the narrative. Beautifully danced by Larissa Sheldon, a girl tries to establish herself as a young woman in the guise of existential woe. “I’m here!” she exclaims. “And I’m here. And I’m here. And I’m here!” Yes, Ms. Rosner, we see you. And don’t worry, you are definitely here.
Lillie Dearmon returns as our sad sorority girl, this time being cared for by the lead, Bito. As Bito, “just need[s] to see it again,” poor Dearmon is forced to relive her past trauma, but Bito is there to protect her.

Jasen relives her trauma of angsty heartbreak through a soulful, powerfully belted a cappella rendition of Janis Joplin’s “Piece of My Heart.” In the shows I’m used to seeing, actors have sudden dance breaks, but in 90 Ways, Jasen gives us a sudden song break, which is another example of Rosner’s proficiency in alternating energies and moods. Unfortunately for Jasen who serves as minstrel, telling us a story of love and loss, acting emotions vulnerably and going through the Kubler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally acceptance, she is not rewarded by protection like Dearmon. Instead, she is oppressed and victimized again after finally letting go. It is tragic to watch, especially after listening to her heart-wrenching vocal performance.
All in all, I must say that I was prepared not to like this. I was unprepared to enjoy it. Rosner feels the two years that went into developing 90 Ways has now reached its end point, but as much as I enjoyed the experience of watching it, technically the work has some structural weaknesses. However, it certainly has more strengths than I expected. One weakness is that the piece was not constructed with theatricality in mind. If it had been, it may have turned out stronger. One would be very ill-informed to not see obvious ties to No Exit and Sartre’s idea that “Hell is other people.” Also, theatre is currently moving in a direction of storytelling through embodiment practice. I was struck by similarity in Rosner’s dance work to work considered to be theatre coming out of Urban Research Theater, which is highly movement-based with only some vocalization, both spoken and sung. I was also reminded of a new work called Gin & It, recently produced at PS 122. In Gin & It, actors choreographically toted around film screens as they inserted themselves inside of Hitchcock’s film Rope. The two-dimensional mode of storytelling became three-dimensional.

Rosner was committed to creating a live performance that hailed to cinematic artistic constructs. Unquestioningly, this is evidenced by the presence of many television sets and video screenings of color, static, and moving images of crashes and the company dancing. I was reminded of films with similar purgatory concepts such as M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense. I was especially brought back to a more recent film called Passengers starring a female protagonist played by Anne Hathaway (similarly characterized as a psychotherapist, like Bruce Willis in The Sixth Sense.) In Passengers, all of the characters, victims of a terrible crash (an airplane in this case,) wander confused, trying to recreate the events, each remembering it differently. The characters start to disappear and reality fragments as the lead, Hathaway, begins to understand where she is and that the people surrounding her are her guides leading her into death from purgatory. What made Passengers more successful structurally than 90 Ways is the twist in the derivative narrative of being trapped in purgatory. Passengers tells a love story that happens between life and death, a fascinating re-envisioning of the directions souls travel. A love story is interesting. Being trapped is not interesting. “I think something happened.” Bito tells the fellow lost souls. Okay, Ms. Rosner, please tell me something interesting. Ambiguity is acceptable, but as relationships are established in a way that the audience is engaged in them, a stronger conclusion is needed. Even though post-modernism doesn’t tie things up with clean endings, this piece was just a little weaker as a result. My father, who was with me at the show, summed this up with his statement as the house lights came up: “How did you know it was over?” I said, “Well, the house lights came up.”

However, as unformed as I found the ending to be, I cannot recall a stronger opening to a piece than the opening of 90 Ways to Wake from Drowning. And “I just needed to see it again.”