January 30, 2008

Images of Alienation

Today, perhaps more than ever, concern for all of the arts is fundamental to the success of any one of the arts. The terms "interdisciplinary" and "multidisciplinary" have featured regularly over the past few decades as a defining term for works of art in all genres. From the get-go, Chez Bushwick has embodied this reality, making it a priority to present music, film, the visual arts, theater and literature along with dance in a continued effort to acknowledge the role collaboration and mutual exploration play in the progression of the arts.

In that spirit, Chez Bushwick presented an evening of video art from France, curated by Christopher Eamon, as part of the 2007 French Institute Alliance Francaise "Crossing the Line Festival." The following are impressions after viewing the films.

If any one thing can be said to be on the minds of contemporary French video artists, it is alienation. At least, that is what one would gather from "Video Art From France," a screening of eight short video works jointly presented by the French Institute Alliance Française and Chez Bushwick as part of the "Crossing The Line Festival" on Friday, October 12, 2007. Selected by Christopher Eamon, curator of the Pamela and Richard Kramlich Collection, each video seemed to speak to a dislocated sensibility by making the familiar seem foreign, nature seem cosmic, and the mundane seem capable of infinite fascination.
Dominique Gonzalez-Förster's "Atomic Park" looks at the arid dunes of White Sands, New Mexico, through a cosmic looking glass. The park, now a recreational destination for tourists, is located near Trinity Site, where the first atomic detonation occurred. In black and white, you see the lunar landscape fizzle in the sun. People appear as little black twigs, moving with the distinct, if concentrated gait of a biped. You can hear shouting back and forth over great distances, but you cannot decipher any words. A soccer ball is kicked around and tumbles across a flat of sand. A group of three people slide down the washed-out slope of a dune, their legs erased each time they dip into the sand. Little picnic huts designed to protect visitors from the sun and wind look like space-age sails. This palpable sense of the foreign-these people don't belong here-is intensified by the knowledge of atomic annihilation that has forever changed the history of this natural wonder.

"You Should Be the Next Astronaut" is Charles de Meaux's sixty-second suggestion of a trailer for a sci-fi film that does not exist. String music accompanies dark images of pack animals that stare into the camera, their eyes, flashing like green diamonds, mirror the stars above them. There is less emphasis on true film trailer aesthetics than there is an attempt to create of morsel of film that tugs at the viewer's willingness to question and anticipate.

"The Boy From Mars" is an astonishingly hypnotic film by Philippe Parreno. Filmed in a remote area in the northern part of Thailand, long, drawn-out shots of nature, lush green foliage and a small pond, a pair of buffalo, and an aeronautic-looking structure made of concrete and wood covered by the billowy skin of a white tarp, create a portrait of a locale that emerges gradually, transforming small feats of graduated change into magnetically powerful events. In one shot, little quavering lights buzz in the sky; airplanes. The building becomes steadily illuminated from within, as two buffalo lumber forward, pulling ropes that generate power for the structure. And when a soft rain begins to fall over the pond, the event is at first without consequence. Only after many seconds, and the landscape begins to show signs of the rain's affects, can you assure yourself it is real.

The mundanity of the cross section of a freeway-a place that is literally passive and meant only to facilitate an impersonal and transitory experience-is the scene of Anri Sala's "Time After Time." Through a grainy night-time image, you can make out the road and a couple of buildings in the background. The focus seems to be coming in and out; you lose the buildings and gain the road. You can hear the atmospheric sounds of distant traffic. Eventually, one of the sounds grows and a light comes in from the side. You know a car is oncoming. As it passes, the jarring flash of the headlights exposes the emaciated and tense body of a horse that is stuck in the meridian of the freeway; then darkness. Eventually you can see more of the horse, as the camera's focus closes in. Another car careens by and the horse kicks up one of its hind legs and holds it there for a moment. Obviously, the horse is out of place. The situation is real and accidental. Sala films it without trying to intervene. This adds to the thrill, as you are filled with horror and fascination.

In 1996, Lucie Dolene sued Disney for copyright restitution when they released Snow White on DVD, the film for which Ms. Dolene provided the French voice of the mythical princess. When she won her case, Disney substituted another woman's voice for Snow White in order to avoid paying Ms. Dolene future royalties. But the French version of the film, with Ms. Dolene's voice, had been around for over thirty years and had become a reference point in France's cultural identity. This is the subject of Pierre Huyghe's documentary, "Blanche Neige (Lucie)," which questions the meaning dislocation in media, here, a result of corporate greed.

Mircea Cantor's looping video piece, "Deeparture," which is meant to be shown as an installation, a deer and a wolf are placed in a white gallery space together with no way to get out. Perhaps, in a reference to Joseph Beuys' "I Like American and America Likes Me," where the artist trapped himself in a gallery with a coyote, Cantor creates a similarly tense environment, filming the two animals from tight angles, maneuvering around them and lacing their apprehensive energies together. The incongruity of these animals, displaced from nature and captive in the apotheosis of human artifice-the gallery-brings a surrealistic edge to this film that could never end.

Shot in black and white and set to an electronic score of cracks and pops, "Totem" presents a moving image of its filmmaker, Maïder Fortuné, dressed as a girl and hopping up and down. The camera is closed in on just her face. The image moves slowly. Gradually, the image begins to smear, folding in on itself, as the body is in motion in either direction. Only then, when the face is at its highest or lowest points, do we see clear images of her face; serene at its zenith, and demonic at its nadir. The superimposition streaks gory portraits of Fortuné across the screen. Monsters of all kinds emerge as the film is slowed down and sped up at varying rates. By scrutinizing the deteriorating affect of motion, Fortuné deracinates the subject from expectations of innocence and preservation.

In "Even If She Had Been a Criminal," a collage film by Jean-Gabriel Périot, dizzying fast forwards of archival footage of various war processions lead to repeated images, in black and white, of crowds of people celebrating. In one shot, someone in the foreground turns around, and, seeing the camera, raises their arms in glee, hands clapping and rejoicing. In another shot, several men stand together in camaraderie; one of the gives a funny smile and reaches his arm out to the side. This goes on, set to a recording of the French National Anthem, until the music gets stuck on a vaguely major chord. At this point, the shots of the celebratory crowds return, but this time, the angles are wider. Behind the person who turns to the camera, you see a woman held up on a barricade; she is getting hit in the face by several men. In the shot of the group of men, you come to see that they are standing around a woman who has a swastika painted on her forehead, and the man with the smile who reaches his arm out, reaches it out to mockingly tickle the woman under her chin; his smile becomes a smirk. This film depicts the social humiliation enacted by the French on French women who were suspected of carrying on relationship with occupying Nazi forces. With its crafty manipulation of media, Périot is able to critique the actions depicted in the source footage, teasing our expectations of documentation, and tightening the grip on a cruel public event that followed an already cruel and alienating war.

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January 28, 2008

The Sixth Borough

The first thing I hear after exiting the building is a loud police siren. The Institute of Contemporary Art in  Philadelphia is closing down for the day, and I'm lugging a bunch of props and set objects awkwardly out the front door. I've just said goodbye to the curators of the museum, who have been extraordinarily kind, intelligent, and accommodating. One of them even knelt on the concrete floor with me, to help focus a projector prior to the show. Aside from the brutally hard concrete floor, the performance went very well. In some ways, concrete is a small price to pay though: performing in a visual arts venue seems insulated by people who actual curate (literally, "care for") the work that's presented, and have taken special attention to the surrounding context. In addition to that, the public has come to see "Art," with a capital A at a public institution. There is an unspoken assumption that when they enter the facility, an artistic experience will occur. This forms an invisible contract, even if unspoken. In that way, there are fewer apologies for the subsequent viewing experience. Even when dance is shown within the walls of a museum, an audience is less likely to preface their observations with "Well, I don't understand dance, but....." There is more likelihood that people will trust their own vision, their own perceptive powers.

The sirens are still blaring, and getting a bit louder. So I start making my way to the car. Philadelphia is often called "The Sixth Borough" among artists, which is not only an affectionate, double-edged joke, but also an increasing truth: artists are emigrating from New York City more often now, and the cheaper prices of Philadelphia are beckoning visual artists, dancers, musicians, and theater artists alike - all of whom are eager to find affordable workspace, and vibrant communities for alternative, experimental, or multidisciplinary work. "Sixth Borough" also refers to violence, I think. The crime rates in Philadelphia are extremely high, perhaps so high that they surpass any of the post-Giuliani five boroughs of New York City. Philadelphia is an outer, "other" borough just 90 minutes away. I hear this nickname more often than I hear "The City Of Brotherly Love," which is perhaps an outdated moniker at this point. Philly is a beautiful, complicated city, and as I walk back to the car, I catch myself thinking, "Why don't I come down here every month?" There is a burgeoning dance scene just 90 minutes away, that's completely accessible by car, train, bus, plane, etc., and it's an extremely affordable trip. 90 minutes is about the distance from Paris to Brussels as well - it's just curious that our country isolates its metropolitan areas the way it does, and I begin to think about my own participant in that isolationism as well.

My friend Michael Hart is rounding up the car, and I stop in a Seven Eleven to get a snack before the trip. Inside, there are oppressive florescent lights, packaged food in rows, Slurp-eee machines, and coolers lining the walls. I also notice a number of surveillance cameras, and low-resolution monitors behind the double counter in the center of the store. They seem to change about every 10 seconds, and skip frequently (which reminds me of the video projector in the museum - it kept flickering with its own rhythm).
I can't quite find anything to eat, and after a while, I become embarrassed of my dancer-neurotic eating habits, so I decide to make a quick choice. I'll get some milk, which has protein, and might help bones which have just danced on concrete. While looking at the skim, whole, low-fat, two-percent, chocolate, non-RBST treated milk, I suddenly start thinking about what I must look like in those cameras - am I being watched? If so, no big deal, but I wonder what it looks like. Through the reflection on the cooler, I can see low-resolution images of my body on the screens behind the counter; it's an angle of my body that I would never be able to see. I then get impatient with myself, snap out of it, choose low-fat milk and head to the cashier. There's a long line. The cashiers are very, very slow. The screens flicker and switch. The employees are chatting. Someone's talking on a cell phone.
I then notice that one of the cashiers touches the other one's hand; she whispers something; one of the male clerks then leaves the counter area; I look outside and see Michael waiting in the car.

Behind me there is a huge eruption, and a loud, shouting voice starts to yell "Get Offa Me," while everyone in line whips around to see what's going on. Two aisles away, three men are swarming around a much larger, stronger man in a down coat. They literally hang onto his arms and back as he flails around, calmly but forcefully, like a giant rhinoceros. Everyone in the store is surprisingly calm, too calm, incongruently calm. "Get The Hell Offa Me. I Don't Have Nothing," the man says, very loudly, but without shouting. He flails and whips his powerful body, and the three men keep trying to overpower him, uselessly. I am totally puzzled because the situation is extreme, but sedated. The man's tremendous body and voice begin propelling through space, trying to shake off the three men, who are now trying to cuff him. As violent as this scene is, it is completely unsurprising: the man is clearly not threatened by the three people clinging to him, and his voice barely needs to shout. In fact, he seems bored - except that he thrashes up and down the aisle, and the other bodies ricochet after him, pitifully, in response to his body's movement. This becomes choreography, without a doubt - probably the most raw improvisation I will ever witness.

The cashiers stand still, and everyone in the line is watching this scene unfold without saying anything. The surveillance screens flicker and switch every 10 seconds. No one knows what to do. But no one is in shock. A bit freaked out, I keep beginning sentences, directed at no one: "This is......"  "Holy shit......" "What....."
 
This continues for about three minutes, with the entire store in a state of inertia. Everyone's attention is arrested, but no one is in any danger. Clearly no one can approach this moving mass of four violent bodies careening through space (it would be ridiculous to intervene), but no one can turn away either. There is milk in my hand, and a five dollar bill on the counter in front of me. This just doesn't make sense. It's totally incongruent with the violence just a few feet away.

These are not my images. I want to abandon this. This continues. I can't watch this. I am drawn to this. This is horrible. This is so static, so low-resolution, and so unthreatening. Where did this come from? I think to myself, as I put down my milk. I decide to leave, but an employee has locked the front door. "We can't let him get away!" says a defiant employee, with her hand on the lock. The experience becomes even more surreal even minute. The man continues to flail and buck wildly.

Newer, louder sirens are sounding now, and they are coming closer with blue lights flickering - a bit like a projector. Suddenly I have a panoramic view of the Seven Eleven from the front of the store. I am completely stuck, witnessing this scene unfold in the aisle, held captive by the event. Everyone is a spectator, an audience member, and I begin to resent this. I feel forced to watch something that I didn't agree to see, and I am forced into voyeurism that I did not decide on. What about that unspoken contract, like in the gallery? When I entered this space, I did not agree to view this. My mind starts protesting the experience by thinking about the aesthetics of it: the choreography of the bodies, the movement, the velocity, the rhythm, the audience, the cameras, the space - and I begin to hate myself for that. The woman opens the door, and I exit.

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January 23, 2008

FORCE MAJEURE: Alexandre Roccoli, "The Unbecoming Solo"

Essay by Ryan Tracy
Photos by Chris Woltmann

Alexandre Roccoli created "The Unbecoming Solo" as part of Chez Bushwick's "Force Majeure" program, which is designed to foster international dialogue in dance and performance by offering residencies to artists from around the world. These residencies, which will be fulfilled from September 2007 through May 2008, will culminate if free public presentations of the work created by the artists-in-residence. Alexandre Roccoli's performance was presented September 27-30 at Chez Bushwick as part of the French Institute Alliance Francaise "Crossing The Line" festival in the fall of 2007.

Intro

It would be completely fair to call "The Unbecoming Solo" investigative art, that is, say, beyond the de facto manner in which most art investigates something either aesthetic or subjective. During his three-month residency as part of Chez Bushwick's "Force Majeure," Alexandre Roccoli went out and interviewed a handful of New York-based creative personalities; a mix of choreographers and others involved in the arts. His interviews, captured on video and in sound, became the foundation for "The Unbecoming Solo," which was presented as a two part event-a video installation and a live performance-at Chez Bushwick.

Image

The title immediately suggests something inchoate. Is "unbecoming" to mean something that is aesthetically unflattering? Or is it, rather, a suggestion of stifled materialization? After watching the video interviews prior to the live performance-which included Miguel Gutierrez, Jeremy Wade, Ann Liv Young, Ryan Kelly and "green" developer, Derek Denckla-there is a definite sense that the latter meaning is where the heart of this work lies. All of the conversations are focused on discussing the creative and economic processes of working as an artist.

Ryan Kelly goes into candid detail about how a truly collaborative process requires a certain amount of "yielding" on the part of the director. Ann Liv Young, in her laconic Southern drawl, expresses annoyance at having to have payed people she felt didn't do good work. Miguel Gutierrez candidly wonders how the Center for Performance Research (CPR) will benefit the dance community at large. And Derek Denckla suggests that CPR is based off the model of the Baryshnikov Arts Center, a venue that is now struggling to maintain a strong foothold.

These are only sound bites of the interviews, which range in duration from 5 minutes to an hour. But they provide an uncensored image of what concerns New York's dance community.The fact that Roccoli himself is not pictured in any of the videos-you just hear his voice softly prompting the video subjects through the casual interviews-already intimates that he, as the artists, has yet to become. A note in the program reads, "...the dancer invents himself through a dialogue with the gestures of others and a sustained exchange with an artistic and cultural community." In this way, Roccoli lays the foundation for what is to become in the live performance. These-the interviews and the information collected by them-are the resources he will use to invent, or, materialize performance.

Solo

In a studio one floor below Chez Bushwick, a large projection screen is set up behind a square of white marley. A limited audience was tucked into just a few rows of seating. In wonderful Chez Bushwick tradition, several sat on cushions on the floor.

Roccoli enters in semi-darkness through a door to the left. Wearing a white jacket, white t-shirt, and white pants, he makes his way to sit at a console downstage (and off to the side) where a sound system is set up. The lights dim, and a single red light glows in front of him.

From here, Roccoli begins to play audio from some of the interviews he collected. The first interview, a female, European filmmaker, speaks about coming to New York and what it means to her to work here. This lasts some time, still in darkness, and the words commingle in your mind with the sound and image remnants that linger from the video installation. Then the interview changes. Now it was a man's voice; of some other nationality; of some other vocation.

As the lights come up, Roccoli takes to the dance floor, now without the jacket. His t-shirt is thin and the iconic, rotund, headless body of Mickey Mouse is printed at the top of the shirt, right up against the collar. The ultimate image of American popular culture-"the mouse"-doesn't necessarily locate us. It rather brings to mind a series of cultural frictions that the ubiquitous distribution of American iconography has garnered around the world: from political derision to economic voracity; form dispersed American tourists to incoming immigrant populations; from the vulgarity of the mass produced object, to the singularity of performance. Roccoli's head emerging from Mickey Mouse's neck might suggest a disconnection, a dissociation from economy and body.

Roccoli's movement style is fluid and generally abstract. A smooth control underlies each movement, and his rhythms slip in and out of sync with speech rhythms of the interviews, and later, with some pop songs that emerge in the sound score; a club song; a Patti Smith cover of "Smells Like Teen Spirit."

What is most surprising about the movement material is the sense of rigorous thematic development present in what could appear to be an improvisational work. But Roccoli repeats specific movements and entire phrases at different angles and in new ways, ways that are subtly or blatantly changed. There is an intelligence to the composition that maintains an articulated sense of development without falling into conspicuous formalism.

His thumbs, cocked, become a recurrent gesture. Undulating hip movements come around again and again. He rolls onto the floor, then props up his rigid body with one arm, like a lever. Then the fingers of his free arm reach up to his chest and pinch his nipple, which acts as a release button, and the body collapses. But there are more abstract movements than not; frozen poses, slow shifts of the spine, jumps, rolls, all sustain an ambiguity and freedom of from theatricality.

Roccoli also explicitly addresses the body in three dimensions. This is particularly captivating when, after he has spent several moments performing close to the screen, the rectangular presence of which flattens the performance to an astonishing degree, he suddenly aims his direction at a diagonal and moves obliquely away from the screen's surface. Your mind's orientation warps, and the body becomes fleshed out once again.

The audio conversations continue to shift and eventually come to overlap. These are the meat of the soundtrack. The words and ideas mix noncommital with the performance. They inform, but they by no means determine. A few times, Roccoli begins lip synching to the conversations, allowing the linguistic faculty of the body to be engaged as much as the limbs and torso. But again, his commitment to a literal representation of the score remains at will.

In the program, Roccoli asks "why most of the European choreographers of my generation are not inclined nowadays to come to New York City?" At the end of the performance, you feel that no single answer has been given; nothing has come, or become. Instead, you have a collection of new information-from the interviews, from Roccoli's freely associative movement, from the fact that he is here, in New York City, creating this work and turning the camera on New York's creative community-that allows you to come to your own conclusions, should that even be a desire. Instead, like Roccoli, perhaps we should launch our own investigations.

Posted by Ryan Tracy at 10:38 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Critical Mass

For its 2007-2008 season, Chez Bushwick has initiated FORCE MAJEURE, an unprecedented artist-in-residence program that brings creative performers from around the world to Brooklyn for two-week residencies, at the end of which, the artists present their work in a performance that is free and open to the public.

These performances have been documented through non-evaluative critical essays written by Ryan Tracy (a co-facilitator of this site, and a familiar voice from Counter Critic). Over the next week, these essays will be posted for you to read.

What is a "non-evaluative critical essay"? Good question.

The literary documentation of live performance has generally been left to the establishment of the critical press. After a performance is given--if it gets attention from the press at all--the review that appears in publication tends to be the only literary account of the event.

With the wealth of new performance going on today, it would be shameful to leave the responsibility of literary documentation to the critical press, and historians. Chez Bushwick aims to compile a body of literature that is as valid a document as any photograph or video, while expanding the idea of a document to include analysis without passing final judgment. These essays are intended to recount, reflect, and communicate - outside of the evaluation systems which exist in printed and online periodicals.

Even blog culture, as much as it may have revolutionized arts coverage, may be just as opinionated and evaluative as the mainstream press. Indeed, the important impetus of blogging is to publicly communicate what one thinks about the world, freely and without restriction, which has the potential for positive impact. But it should be clear that with these essays, Chez Bushwick seeks to provide literary documents of performance without prescriptive taste, and without praising or devaluing the work of the artist: It's a fine line, but we walk it.

Posted by Ryan Tracy at 10:11 AM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

January 21, 2008

Big Bang Theory?

One night I came home to Chez Bushwick, the converted industrial loft and performance space in Brooklyn, and found a throng of people sitting on the floor, attending a party organized by Jeremy Wade and several other experimental performers. It was fantastic. Dozens of people were talking, laughing, arguing, drinking, and watching impromptu performances. Jeremy showed new choreography that he had made that week; Heather Kravas taped on an old man's beard and began a cathartic, durational episode that involved a clip light, my bathroom door, and the transformative powers of her own voice; Loren Dempster delivered one of the most ethereal solos I've ever heard playing the electric cello; and Jack Ferver performed a stand-up routine during which he scolded Jeremy with improvised text. I joined in, too, collecting props for a performance from the neighbors' detritus and the barren, often-surreal landscape of the Bushwick sidewalks, all while people watched from the windows of the loft above.

Something happened that night, and it continues to happen regularly at Chez Bushwick; performers claim a permissive space of possibilities, allowing themselves the chance to experiment free from the societal pressures attached to most performance contexts. That night in the loft, no one imposed a set of rules or regulations and no one was present for the purpose of evaluative criticism or judgment. Yet conversation did occur--this salon-style format of performance led to rigorous dialogue among the people in the loft, and had a catalytic, generative power.

Keeping this in mind, nothing that occurs at Chez Bushwick has ever exactly surprised me; from the moment I established the loft as a rehearsal studio in late 2002, the doors have remained wide open to artists from every walk of life, and it has always been a space where things happen--a space where things are allowed to happen. These initial performances gave way to a showcase organized by Jeremy and myself called SHTUDIO SHOW, which we invited Miguel Gutierrez to curate beginning in 2004. Miguel did a remarkable job of assembling interdisciplinary performances from radically different corners of the New York performance world. He also initiated a series of provocative public interviews with both artists and public figures, notably a guest interview with Vallejo Gantner following a controversial comment about his plans as the new artistic director of PS 122 and a public interview with New York Times dance writer Gia Kourlas after her disparaging remarks about the condition of local dance. To top things off, Miguel invited Technopia (a.k.a Samuael Topiary) to regularly host each event and conduct interviews as a faux-foreign MC, a hilarious alter-ego with razor-sharp wit. Through events such as these, Chez Bushwick quickly earned a reputation as both an incubator of experimental performance and a safe-zone for activism and political debate, often shocking the performance community out of its complacency through a free-for-all approach to public dialogue.

With the expanding social and political impact of Chez Bushwick came the need for documentation and critical writing. Yet in the spirit of experimentalism, the cohorts of Chez Bushwick devised an alternative to review-based journalism in printed and online media. Wanting to maintain an artist-run organization, we engaged Ryan Tracy (a gifted composer and former employee of the Brooklyn Academy of Music) to be an in-house cultural critic; Ryan produced a monthly essay in response to each SHTUDIO SHOW and an profile of the event on www.culturebot.org. Ryan now regularly spearheads essays in response to each performance, and has been a leading force behind online dialogue.

Ironically, the refusal to open the series for public review created unusual media attention amongst dance and performance journalists; Chez Bushwick consequently earned a reputation as a modern-day Salon des Refusés, and was profiled in a number of highly-visible feature articles, as opposed to reviews, in daily or weekly periodicals. Alex Escalante and Matthu Placek (two devoted friends of the space and frequent audience members) have provided photo documentation for each show. After attending and documenting a Chez Bushwick performance by her friend Charlotte Gibbins, Treva Wurmfeld approached me about collaboratively directing a full-length documentary about the development of Chez Bushwick, which is presently in production.

As the SHTUDIO SHOW developed, so did its audience...by the end of 2005, both the attendance and budget had increased by 400% in one year's time, which was overwhelming from any perspective. This exponential growth was exacerbated by the fact that we were not an incorporated 501(c)(3) organization, and had flagrantly disregarded any institutional approach to marketing, audience development, or public relations--we were a space that allowed absolutely anything to happen, and were interested in keeping things cheap for artists--always producing programs that cost only $5 to attend. Yet we had also completely scandalized our neighbors in the building. Following a marathon performance event honoring the video artist Charles Atlas in April, 2006 (entitled A Benefit Of The Doubt, Chez Bushwick's annual fundraiser), I received a concerned phone call from our landlord the next morning. Perhaps it was time to change gears, if the space was to maintain any kind of a sustainable future within the building.

Sometimes when I'm caught off guard, I wake up in the morning with total despair; peers of mine, pioneers of the neighborhood, are already being forced out of their homes and workplaces. Landlords have long been revoking the leases they once offered their tenants. Increasing the scale of its operations while keeping true to the needs of its artists, Chez Bushwick has developed a new series in response to the evolution of Bushwick, addressing the need for a cultural strategy within the neighborhood, and reflecting an internal change within the organization's structure. AMBUSH, a migratory event in the area, was produced monthly by Chez Bushwick in collaboration with nine other alternative spaces, both strengthening relationships between arts organizations in Bushwick and offering larger venues to safely accommodate an ever-increasing audience.

The first AMBUSH event was held on September 9, 2006 to an audience of over 150 people. We worked closely with the raw, unfinished space on the top floor of 3rd Ward, a new art space in the neighborhood that opened in May 2006. Ambiguously titled The Changing of the Garde, the event featured a pan-generational mix of performers across disciplines. In honor of John Cage's birthday, I read with David Vaughan (probably the most resilient 83-year old in New York) from the late composer's writings, in part to acknowledge that the old avant-garde is no longer with us, though it still has incredible resonance. Reflecting this from a musical point of view was Jim Staley, a renegade trombone player and the founder of the experimental music venue Roulette Intermedium. Dance works were offered by Elke Rindfleisch and Wanjiru Kamuyu, and the program also featured the rare chance to see three 1966 performance works for film and video (Abstracting A Shoe, Span, and Legal Size) by Bruce Nauman, a maverick of avant-garde performance who has never strayed far from interdisciplinary experimentation. Finally, Carla Peterson, the newly-appointed artistic director of Dance Theater Workshop (DTW), was interviewed live, continuing Chez Bushwick's unwavering tradition of public dialogue while also indicating another change within the New York "garde": a transfer in the institutional authority of DTW's artistic programming.

We had an overwhelming turnout, and in keeping with the traditions of Chez Bushwick's SHTUDIO SHOW, all of the proceeds go straight to the artists who perform--which I believe is completely unique in New York at this time. In its own way, this creates an ethos of radical doubt with regards to current models of presentation; how can an artist-run venue be paying comparable rates to the more established presentation venues? Will the existing models of performance presentation change, as they once did, due to the initiatives of artist? This remains to be seen. But for the moment, I can't imagine a more vibrant, experimental, and inspiring place to be living and working.

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Merde!

Welcome to the blog for Chez Bushwick, an artist-run organization at the heart of Brooklyn's creative Renaissance that has been fostering and presenting interdisciplinary art and performance since 2002. In addition to offering a $5 subsidized rehearsal space, Chez Bushwick encourages artistic freedom, collaboration, and creative risk-taking through monthly performance programming.

This blog is intended to be an interactive voice for Chez Bushwick, as well as to engage the dance and performance community in creative, responsible discourse relating to topics that concern artists and global citizens.

We hope you enjoy reading this blog. We also encourage you to participate in thoughtful discourse through our comment fields.

Chez Bushwick is pleased to be joining Doug Fox and Great Dance in this significant development, which will enhance the ways that dance artists communicate about our work, and about topics in the digital and global world we inhabit.

Posted by Ryan Tracy at 1:14 PM - Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)