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New Ways to Dance,
Found in the Eyes of Others
By GIA KOURLAS
Published: September 21, 2011
As experimental choreographers and
dancers working in New York in the
1990s, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey
knew each other without truly knowing
each other. But they did share one heady
dance experience: before Ms. Lacey
moved to Paris in 2000, they took part in
an improvisation in the East Village. “My
memory of it was like: ‘Ah! She’ll cut
me!’ ” Mr. Cardona said. “That was my
image of Jennifer. She was so sharp. She
was like a knife.”
Blog
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
While Mr. Cardona, a Bessie-awardJennifer Lacey and Wally Cardona, the choreographers of “Tool Is Loot.”
winning choreographer, has made a
name for himself with large-scale works
that incorporate a multitude of objects, Ms. Lacey is a visionary whose works are infrequently seen in New York
and are much missed.
Certain dancers fade into the background, while others, desperate to please, pour it on too thick. Then there are
those rare few, like Mr. Cardona and Ms. Lacey, with another kind of virtuosity, in which physical precision and
charisma mingle like 21st-century fairy dust. In “Tool Is Loot,” which will be presented at the Kitchen starting
Thursday, they show that quality for all its worth. And it’s worth a lot.
For their first-ever collaboration they have acquired the tools for their unusual production by spending a year
working apart (Mr. Cardona in the United States and Ms. Lacey in France). Each choreographed an “empty solo,”
performed for an expert in a field other than dance, including an architect, an astrophysicist, a medical supply
salesman, a sommelier and a film editor.
Those outsiders, chosen with the help of presenters, had to be strangers to Mr. Cardona and Ms. Lacey. “They also
had to describe themselves as somebody who says, ‘I don’t really know anything about dance,’ ” Ms. Lacey said.
Weeklong encounters ended with performances, in which the solo was embellished with new material initiated by
these advisers. As they’ve discovered, “Tool Is Loot,” which includes original music by Jonathan Bepler, is a lot of
things, but it’s mainly an exploration of aesthetics, of trust and, ultimately, of freedom. For Mr. Cardona and Ms.
Lacey, who first started working together in March, the purpose of the outside experiences was to unravel their
notions about dance and to meet in an undone state.
“I think some people imagine this as some sort of weird social outreach,” Ms. Lacey said. “It has that effect, but it is
certainly not the project. If you’re going to do it properly, you have to be willing to say yes to everything.”
It may seem a strange notion that choreographers would seek the opinions of nonexperts, but as Ms. Lacey said,
she has had enough from people who know a lot about dance. “This came at a time in my life where I had also
decided not to work in the same way,” she said. “The kind of willpower of amassing a gross sum of money and
certain kinds of venues — I was like, I’m going to take a break from that. I don’t want to do it.”
They also weren’t interested in building material to mold once in the studio together; rather, the process was a
way, as the title suggests, to assemble information for an entirely new piece. “They were tools that we had to
develop in order to respond to opinions and desires,” Ms. Lacey said.
It wasn’t easy. One adviser asked Ms. Lacey to perform a dance with a chair as a character. “I thought my head was
going to explode,” she said. She gave it a shot, even though it was, to her, a modern-dance cliché. “By the end of
that week I actually did have something, but it was quite horrifying,” she said. “I really wanted to undo my morality
around certain kinds of esthetics.”
Mr. Cardona found that when an adviser requested something objectionable — like that chair dance, say — it was
often the most thrilling moment of the process. “My responsibility was to do it,” he said, “and suddenly all those
things that you had somehow judged as idiotic and stupid and lesser than, you had to deal with in a different way.”
One of Mr. Cardona’s nondancing experts was Heidi Jo Newberg, an astrophysicist and professor at Rensselaer
Polytechnic Institute, who was not initially forthcoming. In an interview she described the experience as among her
stranger encounters. For one, she found Mr. Cardona’s questions disconcerting. “He would want to know what I
thought and what it made me think about and what associations I had — and I’m a physicist, right?” she said,
laughing. “We don’t talk about our feelings, and we don’t say things that are difficult to say to each other.”
On their first day in the studio Mr. Cardona began his solo by walking around the room and taping the floor. “He’s
rearranging chairs and turning lights on and off, and he gets up on a chair and kind of falls off the chair — he’s dying
on the chair or melting or something — and he ran in place for 10 minutes,” Dr. Newberg said. “I was like: Oh my
God, this isn’t dance.”
Gradually, after Mr. Cardona pulled her into the process, incorporating material from their conversations about
concepts of space for the final showing, she realized that she had never considered the idea of art research before.
“My research is in astronomy,” Dr. Newberg said. “We’re not curing cancer, we’re not building a faster computer,
we’re not making anybody money. It’s pure research for the sake of doing research, so in some sense I feel like he
does that same thing.”
While “Tool Is Loot” is informed by the aesthetic propositions of the strangers — there is more than one chair
dance — it is the artists’ work. “We are making decisions,” Mr. Cardona said.
And as the piece is coming together, Mr. Cardona said he often turns to the more memorable phrases of his
advisers. “I find it very helpful,” he explained, “to go back to what these people valued rather than going into: What
do I value?”
Those phrases, Ms. Lacey added, “have been sufficiently reduced to ‘Star Wars’ — Obi-Wan Kenobi quotes: ‘The
dance is there to show the space.’ Or ‘Nothing you can do can ever please me.’ ”
Mr. Cardona said with a laugh: “That one is still liberating. I love it.”
“Tool Is Loot” will be performed Thursday through Saturday and Sept. 29 through Oct. 1 at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 255-5793, Ext. 11;
thekitchen.org.
With the Help of Unusual Outsiders, Finding Love in Strange Objects
By Brian Seibert
Published: September 23, 2011
The process behind “Tool Is Loot,” the collaboration between Jennifer
Lacey and Wally Cardona that had its premiere at the Kitchen on
Thursday, was willfully, even perversely circuitous.
Ms. Lacey gets up close and personal with a folding chair in “Tool Is
Loot.”
The two choreographers spent the first year of the project apart, on
different continents. Instead of working with each other, they consulted
with experts far outside the dance world. Each expert’s opinions and
suggestions, even those that struck Ms. Lacey and Mr. Cardona as
idiotic, were incorporated into a solo. A total of 14 dances resulted,
none of which appear in “Tool Is Loot,” though they influenced the
outcome.
Whatever works. For when “Tool Is Loot” comes together, and that is
most of the time, it is utterly original, deeply comic and deviously
beautiful. It doesn’t hurt, of course, that both Ms. Lacey and Mr.
Cardona are effortlessly charismatic performers.
Ms. Lacey, who has lived in Paris since 2000, is now the lesser-known
figure in New York, where she made a name for herself in the 1990s.
But what a fearless, whip-smart artist she is. It’s hard to recall a funnier
sequence in recent contemporary dance than her love scene here with a
folding chair. The chair is mute, inert; her girlish reactions give it life.
Later she pulls off that hoary concept, a robot dance.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Mr. Cardona pulls off his own antiquated aesthetic, sporting a thick
chevron mustache. His dancing, broader than Ms. Lacey’s, is selfdramatizing, a crazy mix of pedestrian and histrionic gestures. At one point, he seems to go through a nervous
breakdown; at another, he acts out the story of a tryst between an Indian prince and a mustachioed sailor. Though
the tone is humorous, the absurdity gives Mr. Cardona access to a tenderness that his sophistication might
otherwise preclude.
We also hear the story of the prince in one of the voice-overs that alternate between Mr. Cardona’s wry baritone
and Ms. Lacey’s NPR whisper. At various times, objects onstage (two chairs and the two dancers) are described in
awkwardly scientific language that drifts into odd poetry, and a self-mocking play-by-play accompanies reprised
sections of dance.
The sound score, made especially strange and wonderful by the musical contributions of Jonathan Bepler, keeps
nipping at the ear from all sides. When all the elements are firing together, their collective force is operatic.
Alas, the ending lost me. For once, the work seemed to be trailing residue of its curious genesis, perhaps the ideas
contributed by an astrophysicist. Where before, the recalcitrant material seemed to liberate Mr. Cardona and Ms.
Lacey, at the end it removed them from sight. And such enchanting performers as these should be seen.
“Tool Is Loot” will be performed on Saturday, and Thursday through next Saturday, at the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea; (212) 255-5793, Ext. 11;
thekitchen.org.
How Do You Define “Object”?
By Deborah Jowitt
Published: October 7, 2011
Some choreographers devote a lot of creative energy to finding a
great new way to lift a leg (or a partner), or maybe split unison into
counterpoint. Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey? Not so much.
Undertaking alone—he in New York, she in Paris — the research
that led to their joint project, Tool Is Loot (at the Kitchen September
22 through 24 and September 29 through October 1), they sought
advice and responses from people in other fields, including an
astrophysicist, a sommelier, a medical supply salesman, and an opera
singer. Each choreographer offered the chosen expert-of-themoment an “empty solo,” onto which said expert could project his
or her desires and instructions.
I saw Cardona perform one of these “interventions” at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center last winter. He and sound artist-social
activist Robert Sember worked together for a week and then
showed the result, with Francis Stansky and Sember getting into the
act. What followed was a pause-pocked interplay of verbal
instructions and the movements they generated; we could see
thoughtful, non sequitur gestures without knowing the instructions
that produced them; see-hear the two strands together as cause and
effect; and watch the men interpreting in their own ways what they
heard through headphones The experience was curious, as if a game
played with basic movements had become something knottier and
wispier at the same time.
Jennifer Lacey and Wally Cardona in Tool Is Loot. Photo: Paula Court
Cardona’s and Lacey’s initial projects, perhaps buckling under so much input, disappeared, but some of the ideas
generated during the process found their way into the fascinating and mysterious Tool Is Loot. Here we see two
vastly gifted dancers having their way—alone and together—with ideas thrust upon them. The invited dramaturges
no longer have immediate power. For the pair’s Kitchen season, the collaborators are composer Jonathan Bepler
and lighting designer Thomas Dunn, who offer their own rich forms of commentary and interpretation (Bepler’s
score involves a variety of orchestral instruments, plus samplings—such as passages by a children’s choir and a
Japanese recorder club.)
The delayed-meaning idea comes into play with Cardona’s first solo. You watch him and think, “What is this man
doing?” Clearly something. Eyes closed, he listens; perhaps he’s in dark place. He walks on tiptoe, tracing scalloping
paths. He gestures, seems to swoon in rapture, strikes a heroic pose, stumbles over a folding chair, humps it briefly,
bows (not in that order). He slides his hand under his shirt and strokes himself, licks his armpit, moans a little. The
solo is a marvel of unexpected movements and emotions vividly rendered. Drum beats. Exit.
Then we hear Lacey’s voice telling of an erotic encounter between a young prince and a mustachioed sailor
(Cardona’s own mustache is impressive). Was their meeting planned? The prince slips out of the palace at night, a
cloak is thrown over his head, he is pushed down. Hands move over his body; he faints. He wakes alone. So that is
what Cardona’s solo was envisioning. And the tenderness of the sailor, the skipping young prince, the cloak over
the face recur later, both in movement images and in a recorded voice (Cardona’s) that rises excitedly into a
childish squeak.
One of Lacey’s advisors wanted her to make a chair into a character and perform
with it. Cliché alert! Take cover. She didn’t, and we should be grateful. Wipe
your mind of all the anguished chair dances you’ve seen. In her opening solo,
Lacey, profile to us, gets acquainted with one of the two folding chairs, trying
things out with it— attempting risky balances on it, but always perfectly
controlled. At first you might think that the text spoken by the unseen Cardona
is a description of the chair: “This object has two stands connected to the
ground and two parts hanging low.” But, no, he’s talking about Lacey—her
planted feet, her dangling arms. When she undulates her spine in an uncannily
thorough way, he mentions the object’s “ability to be snakelike.”
This studied dehumanization of a person is counterbalanced by Lacey’s second
chair scene. Sitting on the floor beside her fold-up partner, she acknowledges
that it is a chair, but also treats it as a friend who is about to become something
more. Her monologue is both droll and strangely tender. Speaking as if the two
were having coffee together, occasionally giggling nervously, she happens to
mention Charles and Ray Eames—“you know, the Eames chair.” Then sensing a
reaction from her companion, she says quickly, “I didn’t mean to hurt your
feelings” (or words to that effect). The conversation turns to the Scandinavian
chair she grew up with and touches on socialism in Sweden. Gradually, Lacey
finds the chair more and more attractive. By the time Cardona returns to involve
the other chair in his scenario, and Bepler’s light chords and ticking sounds give
way to drums and stronger piano sounds, Lacey is slowly moving her chair
upstage, rubbing her crotch dreamily on its seat.
Cardona "Telling" a Tale.
Photo: Paula Court
Lacey has a final appearance. Wearing a version of a little girl’s white sailor dress,
she moves in dim light like a gentle robot or a very nice doll come to life. To high
piping joined by rougher horn sounds, she walks on tiptoe, turning this way and
that, repeating a few precise gestures. It’s a beautifully understated performance.
In the end, Cardona opens the black curtain at the back to reveal a blindingly
white canvas. He and Lacey don’t stay long. They exit quietly, hand in hand,
leaving us to listen to the music and watch the luminous display that Dunn
creates on the white backdrop. Concentric suns and constellations pulsing and
transforming, mist and clouds, colors leaking into sunrises and sunsets.
Words heard just before this hint at underlying thoughts. I catch only a few—“a
soft wind entering the body,” “a machine with a heart,” something about
evolution, reaction, satisfaction, and finally, “it was beautiful.”
The residue of all the theories and ideas and desires that these two
extraordinary artists asked to have p
rojected onto them creates a texture rife
with enigmas and queries about, I think, what it means to be human. Puzzling Tool
Is Loot may be, but it’s exhilarating watching superb performers approach dancing
as if it were an archaeological site yielding perplexing, yet intriguing shards.
Lacey and Partner. Photo: Paula Court
BEST OF DANCE 2011
By Gia Kourlas
Tool Is Loot This collaboration between Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey—
with Jonathan Bepler’s odd, whimsical score—incorporated strangers’ feedback,
from the mundane to the profound, to show their inimitable, transfixing gifts as
performers.
Congo and Kabuki and Salutes to Mr. B
By Claudia La Rocco
Published September 18, 2011
Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey The Kitchen’s dance offerings get off to a bang with “Tool Is Loot,” which
follows a year of Mr. Cardona and Ms. Lacey working independently on tandem projects with nondance experts,
including a medical supply salesman, an art critic and a social activist. Sept. 22-Oct. 1. The Kitchen, 512 West 19th
Street, (212) 255-5793, thekitchen.org.
The Week Ahead
September 16-22
Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey (Thursday through Oct. 1)
What does it take to make a duet? What are our expectations going in, as audience members? The widely respected
Mr. Cardona and Ms. Lacey have spent the last year working apart, together; they’ve been collaborating with
nondance experts (an opera singer, a salesman, a sculptor, et al.). And now they’re reuniting for “Tool Is Loot”: let
the adventures continue. At 8 p.m., the Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, Chelsea, (212) 255-5793, thekitchen.org;
$15, or $12 for students and 65+. (La Rocco)
GOINGS ON ABOUT TOWN: DANCE
WALLY CARDONA / JENNIFER LACEY
It’s an odd notion: a duet conceived in the course of a year by artists living in different countries. “Tool Is Loot” is
actually made up of several moving parts. Recently created solos by each of the choreographers—Cardona’s
“Intervention” series and Lacey’s “My First Time with a Dramaturge”—are interwoven with a pas de deux that they
developed together during the summer. The result is a collision of worlds and styles. Cardona, known for his brainy
explorations of space and stage architecture, makes dances that resemble beehive colonies in their complexity;
Lacey, an American based in Paris, creates works born of a voluptuous imagination, articulated by her sensual
vocabulary of movement. The question is, what will they cook up together?
September 22 – October 1
The Kitchen
512 W. 19th St., New York, N.Y.
212-255-5793
thekitchen.org
Wally Cardona’s Ridiculous Bliss
posted by Wendy on Monday, Sep 26, 2011
Tool Is Loot at The Kitchen seemed to be
supremely perverse, but I was less interested in
the piece itself and more interested in the two
choreographers—Wally Cardona and Jennifer
Lacey—as performers.
I say perverse because it was a duet in which the
two hardly ever danced together, and because it
was made with input from people who had no
experience in dance. (See our Sept. “New York
Notebook.”)
Even after trying to rid themselves of their
creative habits by calling in such people, Cardona
and Lacey were very much themselves—and I’m
glad. They both embody this quote by Merce
Cunningham: “I think dance only comes alive
when it gets awkward again.”
Wally Cardona in Tool Is Loot. Photo by Paula Court, Courtesy The Kitchen.
Although Lacey is an interestingly sly performer, especially in how outrageously, um, tactile she can be with objects,
it was Cardona’s dancing that grabbed me. Vivid, thought provoking, and even giddy-making, he indulges in his own
idiosyncrasies like some precocious child. I had seen him perform in his own work as sort of a catalyst who makes
surprises happen both architecturally and interaction-wise. But this time his own dancing captured my attention
completely. He performed as though he were in a room by himself, remembering, forgetting. In one passage, his
hand got stuck inside his shirt (on his heart?) while he was otherwise occupied. And then, the hand sprang out of his
shirt, suddenly looking like a foreign object to him.
He took many little sidesteps on tiptoe with an odd combination of apology, playfulness, and keen consciousness. He
knocked wrists and knees together in a sweetly abject way, as though enjoying how small he could become—always
with a glint of mischief.
The intensely private nature of his dancing opened up such a field of fantasy that I was reminded of the powerfully
projected imagination of the late butoh master Kazuo Ohno. Like Ohno, Cardona seemed entranced by his own
gestures (at times paw-like, at times alarmingly agitated), and like Ohno, he embodied both female and male. Cardona also has a quality that reminds me of Steve Paxton: The more he burrows into his own imagination, the
more kinetically alive he becomes. Early in the piece we hear Lacey’s recorded voice tell a story about a prince
enjoying the touch of a mustachio-ed man’s lips on his body and then seeing the stars. At the end, we hear the
sound of Jonathan Bepler’s crazily cracking falsetto voice making its way through the same story while Cardona
cavorts around the space—and it’s a bit of heaven.
“Tool Is Loot” at the Kitchen
by Andy Horwitz
Published: September 26, 2011
Over the course of the past year Wally Cardona and Jennifer
Lacey worked independently, creating encounters with
individuals whose experience and expertise was outside the
field of dance. Cardona’s project was called Intervention and
Lacey’s was called My First Time With A Dramaturge. Each of
them used this process – which manifested as 14
independent one-time performances – to create a solo. Then
this summer they came together to create a duet and
interpolate/integrate the solos into an evening length
performance called Tool Is Loot.
It is an interesting premise for an investigative creative
process, but not having seen any of the 14 one-offs firsthand,
I was left wondering how the information they gathered was
integrated into the final product. Sometimes it seemed
obvious – snippets of dialogue were included in Jonathan
Bepler’s score – and one assumes these were taken from the
non-dance experts that were part of the development
process. Other times – for instance Lacey’s opening dance
with a folding chair – it was less easy to tell.
Jennifer Lacey by Paula Court
It raises an interesting, and recurring, question. How much do we need to know about background and process to
appreciate the work itself? Can it be enjoyed and encountered on its own terms? Or is it absolutely necessary to
know the entire backstory of a piece from inspiration to influence to process to implementation?
Going into Tool Is Loot on Friday I didn’t know much of the backstory at all. I knew a little bit about Wally’s
Intervention series but that was about it. And I found that even had I known less than that, I still would have enjoyed
the piece.
Both Lacey and Cardona are compelling dancers, in different ways.
Cardona is quick and quirky – he did a lot of work on his tiptoes and with his upper body and arms. He is nimble
and assured, transitioning cleanly and confidently between small, idiosyncratic movements and grander, sweeping
gestures. Sporting a really bushy “Village People” moustache, he came off as kind of a jokester with an edgy
undertone.
Lacey is also quick and quirky but in a different way. She has a great sense of humor and moves with grace and
precision, but where Cardona seems to move from his outer extremities, Lacey seems to have her energy more
centered in her pelvis and core. She just feels very grounded and earthy and deeply vibrant.
I may be a bit biased because my favorite part of the show was actually Lacey’s monologue to a chair, which was
both touching and hilarious. She delivers the monologue as if she were on a date, at that point in the relationship
where it has been casual and now it is going to get more serious because the connection has deepened. The scene
could have felt awkward and misguided, but her delivery was so natural, open and funny that you immediately
bought it and went with her. As the monologue morphed into a movement sequence in which she gets rather, um,
amorous with the chair it was fascinating to see the humor give way to intense physicality.
Cardona and Lacey’s dancing together was a great balance of their different energies and vocabularies and was
consistently engaging.
And though some people weren’t so crazy about the end sequence – basically a 5 minute light show after the
dancers had left the stage – I found it to be a compelling coda or question mark, a cue to process information in a
different way, to meditate on what we had just witnessed in the dance and think about all the other ways that ideas
can be researched, embodied, transformed and transmitted.
Tool Is Loot was a wonderful, thoughtful and engaging performance made by two very different but equally gifted
dancers. It would be nice if we could have access to their “research” and see how they got from Point A to Point B.
But who knows? Maybe they’ll revisit their investigation and making something else? Only time will tell.
SOLOMON SAYS
By Gus Solomons
Published September 27, 2011
Wally Cardona is an intellectually rigorous artist with enormous curiosity about the expressive possibilities of
dance, and he sets himself fascinating challenges, of which “Tool is Loot” is the latest. Curated by Yasuko Yokoshi
and presented at the Kitchen (9/22-24 and 9/29-10/1), “Tool Is Loot” is curiously compelling because of its curious
blend of transparency and opacity. The performers Cardona and Jennifer Lacey, of course, are worth watching,
whatever they do onstage. And this investigation is part of the real stuff of art, however abstruse.
Last year, Cardona and Lacey worked separately – she in France and he in the U.S. – staging week-long encounters
with non-dance experts to subject their esthetic positions to scrutiny and inquiry by people in other disciplines like
astrophysics, wine-tasting, film editing, and social activism, among others. Although none of that movement
material appears in this piece, Cardona says, “the work has been formed through aesthetic propositions that
persisted because of their foreignness” – a not atypically elliptical notion from Cardona, which I translate to mean
that the residue of those previous investigations subconsciously infuses present decisions.
Lacey, in a fitted tunic and gray calf-length tights, enters the black space, lit dimly by Thomas Dunn – whose lighting
throughout is purposely, eloquently pedestrian – and confronts the white folding chair that sits casually mid-stage.
She considers it, squats before it, lies with her calves resting on its seat, climbs onto it. All the while, Cardona’s
disembodied baritone describes the action, “the object in the space, with two stands on the floor and two hanging
down… the top part of the object faces up … the object can fold in the middle.” We contemplate the human as
an objective thing.
After she skips off behind the black drapes, Cardona enters on the other side in shirt and jeans, windmills his arms,
tiptoes in curving paths, runs here and there, looking for something at the edges of the space, skips around like a
love-struck swain. His actions seem dramatic, even pantomimic; he strokes his chest under his shirt, licks his
armpit, and wails into his cupped hands. Sounds by collaborating composer Jonathan Bepler’s consist of trombone
farts, trumpet bleats, an assortment of isolated noises, including his own singing voice, and banging piano chords.
After Cardona leaves, Lacey’s voice tells a tale of the romantic infatuation of an Indian prince for a hairy,
mustachioed man, and we realize that it’s the story Cardona has just acted out; it also explains the incongruous
literalness. It’s worth noting that deadpan Cardona is a gifted physical comedian.
Lacey has an earnest conversation with her folding chair, which, she learns, is envious of Charles Eames’s legendary
furniture. She reassures the flimsy folding chair that style is superficial, while design is a response to a need. Then
she proceeds to have sex with the chair in a way that’s amusingly – and a little disturbingly – graphic.
When the two dance together, it’s hard not to recall Cardona’s 2008 brilliant collaboration with Rahel Vonmoos
and innovative lighting designer Roderick Murray, “A Light Conversation,” a much more kinetically intense
encounter than this. There, at Joyce SoHo, the proximity of the audience, ringing three sides made the work
almost unbearably – wonderfully – intimate. The texture and tenor of “Tool” is delicate and less physically
compelling but still philosophically rich in the queries it posits: blurring the line between human and object, the
displacement of the enactment and narration of the fairy tale, its almost-a-palindrome title…
Cardona draws back the black curtain to reveal a huge, blindingly white projection screen, lashed to a pipe frame.
Dunn uses low front light to throw shadows of the dancers on it, as they rock back and forth on the floor. About
an hour into the piece, the dancers exit behind the screen, which then goes through its own seven-minute “dance”
of vivid color washes, a full moon that brightens into a white-hot sun, a view of the galaxy that dissolves into cloudy
miasma, and finally total darkness.
IMPRESSIONS OF TOOL IS LOOT
Connecting the Dots
By Cory Nakasue
As soon as I took my seat and skimmed my program, I knew this piece would involve a constellation. Was it the
fact that an astrophysicist (among other experts like sommeliers and architects) was involved in the process of
making Tool Is Loot ? Was it because last year (almost to the day) I saw a section of this piece in process at EMPAC
based on a meeting with an astrophysicist? Am I psychic?
The answers: Yes. Probably. I don’t think so, but I’m highly impressionable. And none of it really matters anyway.
Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey created this piece with an ocean between them and under the influence
of “encounters,” with non-dance specialists; none of the material actually appearing in the finished work. However,
the fingerprints of these “outsiders” as they’re called in the program are all over this Rubik’s Cube of a piece. The
rigorous research process of these encounters that were made into several solos before the final evening-length
work is impressive, but invisible—the effect being more of a marinade than an actual ingredient.
The multidimensionality of Tool Is Loot is mind-boggling while being stealthily poignant. Whether we’re watching
Lacey’s intimate conversation with a chair (and bravo for the commentary on the ubiquity of the folding chair in
contemporary dance) or Cardona’s physically broader compendium-of-all-human-experience, you are moved. You
are in the hands of dance insiders and experts of composition.
The piece is revealed in episodes, mostly solos and sparingly used duets that reprise and evolve as if reincarnating
from alternate worlds. The solo that you thought was a re-enactment of a melodramatic film (a la silent films of the
1920s) comes back to haunt you quite literally, as a Rumi-esque meditation on loss, and then shape-shifts into a bit
silliness that goes berserk and peters out.
The movement material and performances more than stand up to the monumental structure and vision of the
piece; no mean feat considering the mind altering lighting design by Thomas Dunn and wildly diverse sound
program by Jonathan Bepler. Lacey’s unfaltering ability to be absolutely present within each moment and interaction
is eerily authentic. Cardona’s blend of emotional specificity and physical dynamism is arresting to say the least.
Whether they are simulating love-making with folding-chairs or simply folding chairs, they are compelling
performers. Both are able to seamlessly weave in and out of theatricality, the abstract, and the Meta. For instance
during moments when the solos are performed to voiceovers that describe the movement on stage, they are able
to walk a fine line between expressivity and literality. Most importantly they areable to create a sense of intimacy
and vulnerability amid a circus of cerebral gymnastics.
The climactic ending has no movement and no performers. Just us, the audience, held captive by our own physical
sensation, immersed in white lights and escalating sound. Was there a constellation?
You betcha, right at the end, along with the crescendo of the Big Bang and the birth of galaxies. I felt connected to
everyone in the theater, every lighting instrument, and every speck of dust on the floor…a very Carl Sagan
moment.
A testament to the fact the most personal things in life are often the most universal.
7Feb/11
TWI-NY TALK: WALLY CARDONA
Wally Cardona will hold INTERVENTION #5 on February 12 at the Baryshnikov Arts Center
On January 8, Brooklyn-based dancer and
choreographer Wally Cardona held the first of
three New York City “Interventions” at the
Baryshnikov Arts Center, intimate, experimental
performances created over a whirlwind five-day
collaboration with a specially selected expert from
outside of the traditional dance community.
Working with sound artist and activist Robert
Sember, Cardona developed a complex piece
involving verbal and nonverbal communication
and movement over the course of a series of
repeated scenes, each with unique and challenging
variations. On February 12, Cardona will stage
INTERVENTION #5 with Martin Kapell, a
design partner and architect at WASA/Studio A,
who specializes in designing spaces for the
performing and visual arts, including the
Baryshnikov Arts Center itself. “My commitment
to architecture springs from the principle that
everyone is entitled to the benefits of intelligent
design,” Kapell notes in his online bio, “and that
architecture, when approached from this belief, can directly enhance and improve the way we live, work, learn, and
play.” Cardona and Kapell are just beginning their collaboration, which will be presented Saturday night at BAC;
Cardona discussed that and more in a twi-ny talk held shortly after the fourth Intervention.
twi-ny: In the past you’ve collaborated with such sound, visual, and movement artists as Phil Kline, Rahel Vonmoos, the
Brooklyn Youth Chorus, Maya Ciarrocchi, ETHEL, Douglas Fanning, and now Robert Sember. What is the anticipation
like waiting to hear which collaborator has been selected for you? Do you have any inklings yet on who your collaborators
will be for #5 and #6?
Wally Cardona: I now know Intervention #5 will be with Martin Kapell, and that his profession is in architecture and design.
Anticipation: I suppose that begins to show up — and take on various emotional states, depending on my frame of mind — on the
day of our first meeting. For me, a powerful thing in each Intervention is not just the fact that I’m meeting a person from a very
different discipline or field of inquiry but that I’m meeting a complete stranger. And with the agreement that we’ll spend a week
together. The first thing that happens is I perform my “empty solo” for them, and I have to confess that with each Intervention, I
begin the second day wondering if the person will show up again.
twi-ny: In New York City, you’ve performed at BAM, the Joyce and Joyce SoHo, Danspace Project, the Duke, and DTW.
You’re currently working at BAC. How is the space there informing the new work?
Wally Cardona: I’m glad you brought up BAC! They’ve been incredibly generous in supporting and presenting three
Interventions. Each time, you never know what you’re gonna get. With a working period radically condensed to five days and an
agreement to make the resources usually available to me as a choreographer also available to each “expert,” all questions re: lights,
sound, audience set-up, running time, etc., are usually unknown until the last day. So, all our methods and coping mechanisms are
challenged — presenter, tech crew, artist, expert, and perhaps audience.
Robert Sember, Wally Cardona, and Francis Stansky perform the challenging and inventive INTERVENTION #4 on January 8 at BAC.
twi-ny: What was it like to have Misha witness INTERVENTION #4?
Wally Cardona: Misha’s got soooo much information in his body. Something wonderful happens when being watched by a person
with that amount of knowledge. I’m not sure I can explain it. It’s like I see more of myself. And one thing I find incredibly
inspiring about Misha is how he is able to use a minimal amount of force to maximal effect. I feel like a bull in a china shop in
comparison.
twi-ny: You have given yourself a mere five days to work with each collaborator at each venue. Why do that to yourself?
Wally Cardona: The entire construct of the collaboration is not like any I’ve experienced before. The point really is to initiate —
rather than find mutual agreement or choreograph a “new work by Wally Cardona.” If an expert’s desire or request puts me in an
uncomfortable position that feels at odds with my own preference, patterns, likes, or dislikes . . . I’m happy. So it’s kind of like a
self-imposed intervention and they are aggressive, in their own bizarre way. Each puts me on shaky ground, demands my constant
attention and works best when my generosity overrides my fear.
twi-ny: The word “intervention” works on several levels but immediately conjures up an action taken against one person
or event. Why did you choose it as the title of this series of collaborations, since the word “collaboration” can be
interpreted to be in direct conflict with “intervention”?
Wally Cardona: People often wonder how an Intervention actually works. This is part of a paragraph given to each “expert” before
we meet: “We begin as strangers and get acquainted through a weeklong working process. On Day One, I perform my ‘empty
solo’ for each collaborator as a starting point and form of introduction. I present each expert with the same solo, which is designed
to bend to his/her interpretation, desire, or aesthetics. What I am most interested in is what each expert might want to see even
though he/she might not yet know how to make it manifest; how to do this is to be discovered, together, in the studio. Each expert
is asked to think of me as a tool to be utilized and exercised, and I, in turn, call upon my own expertise to realize his/her vision.
There is no system to the week and how it unfolds; it is unique to each expert. What we know is that a public performance is the
final result, which the expert cannot make without me, and for which I am reliant on the expert's opinion.”
photo by Peggy Kaplan / artwork by Adam Shecter
January 8, 2010
DANCE REVIEW | WALLY CARDONA AND RAHEL VONMOOS
Talking of Kierkegaard, in Words and Movement
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
In theory, a contemporary dance set to a BBC
discussion of Kierkegaard sounds ominously didactic.
In practice, on Thursday night at the Joyce SoHo, it was
anything but, when Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos
reprised “A Light Conversation,” their acclaimed
collaboration from 2008. And on second thought, the
work’s content makes sense: Kierkegaard, with his
interest in indirect communication and subjectivity,
might well have found great riches in the complex
ambiguities of nonrepresentational dance, particularly
when performed by sophisticated artists like Mr.
Cardona and Ms. Vonmoos.
The BBC program, “In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg,”
plays in increasingly fragmented fashion in a sound
score, by Mr. Cardona, which also includes music by
Jefferson Airplane and inconclusive spoken phrases
from an exchange between the two choreographers.
Their movement phrases are similarly stop and start, so
that the duet at times seems like two separate
conversations and at others like two people talking over
each other, with only occasional moments of real
communion. The audience sits on three sides of the
black-box space instead of in the predictable
proscenium setting (why don’t more choreographers
make use of the theater’s versatility?), and Mr. Cardona
and Ms. Vonmoos sometimes seem to face out at their
viewers more than they face each other.
Such simultaneity of action doesn’t add up to a busy
work. Rather, these two seem like conflicting thoughts
flickering through one mind. As Mr. Cardona whips
and slices his taut limbs in big explosions or oscillates
his hips through slinky steps, Ms. Vonmoos walks the
perimeter, holding individuals’ eyes with a calm,
vulnerable stare.
At other times the two mash against each other at fierce
angles. He presses his face to her curved neck; she curls
out of his embrace and just out of reach. A startling
burst of drums sends them racing about; are the forces
that buffet them coming from within or without? The
question seems deliciously naïve in such a context.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos on Thursday at the Joyce
SoHo performing in their work “A Light Conversation.”
Throughout, Roderick Murray’s lighting design shifts with
the dancers, creating an emotional landscape where the
action is one minute shrouded in darkness, the next
exposed in icy, fleeting clarity. Other moments are gentler,
bathing the pair in mellow tones.
As the recorded roundtable swirls around Kierkegaard’s
knotty beliefs, the physical conversation poses its own
unanswerable questions. We are all of us “temporal
beings,” one BBC guest says, and dance is as good a
philosophy as any for getting at the nature of being.
The Bragg program also addresses the idea of despair as
the “failure to be or to become oneself.” To watch mature
dancers like Mr. Cardona and Ms. Vonmoos is to see the
opposite of such despair, and get a small sense of just how
much effort that continuing journey takes.
“A Light Conversation” runs through Tuesday at the Joyce
SoHo, 155 Mercer Street; (212) 431-9233, joyce.org.
October 2, 2008
DANCE REVIEW | 'A LIGHT CONVERSATION'
What Bodies Talk About When They Talk
About Love and Art
By GIA KOURLAS
The first thought that crosses the mind when
entering the Joyce SoHo for “A Light
Conversation,” a collaboration by Wally Cardona
and Rahel Vonmoos, is a pleasant one: Where am I?
The space, newly enclosed with taut black cloth,
obliterates the ordinary proscenium arrangement
with seating on three sides. White and golden lights
rain beams on the stage, rendering the theater
pristine, oddly spacious and fit for a pair of jewels.
“A Light Conversation,” performed Tuesday, is
anything but. Set largely to the BBC radio program
“In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg,” the discussion
heard over the speakers focuses on Kierkegaard.
Yet Mr. Cardona, a Brooklyn choreographer, and
Ms. Vonmoos, Swiss born and living in London,
relate a deeper conversation with their bodies.
At the outset their differences are palpable. Mr.
Cardona, slicing his arms through the air, moves
with a darting urgency. Ms. Vonmoos encapsulates
a quality of stillness and authority; taking charge
with minimal effort, she is as big as life. Together
they become a fluid being, reflecting on
Kierkegaard’s philosophical writings about the
many facets of love and friendship as well as the
notion of ethics and aesthetics. When the subject of
Socrates is brought up, they cut jagged patterns
across the stage to a recording of pounding drums
and crashing cymbals.
Most important, they never speak; this is not
another work in which choreographers of a certain
age (over 40) ruminate aloud on what it’s like to
have chosen an arduous career in dance. Instead “A
Light Conversation” is a piece about two beings, as
the radio program announces at one point, “in the
process of becoming.”
That cycle is evident in Mr. Cardona and Ms.
Vonmoos’s bodies, which react to the rhythm and
Hiroyuki Ito for The New York Times
Wally Cardona, foreground, and Rahel Vonmoos
during a performance of their duet at the Joyce
SoHo.
patterns of speech with the kind of fluency and
articulation that only mature dancers possess. When
Ms. Vonmoos gently rests a hand on Mr. Cardona’s
chest, a phrase jumps out: “Find a truth, which is
true for me.”
As Roderick Murray’s lighting, something of a third
character, keeps the conversation flowing — adding
punctuation and depth to movement phrases — the
viewer can’t help but wonder: Where does one
dancer begin and the other end? In the arresting
“Light Conversation” the truth is that they don’t.
“A Light Conversation” continues through Sunday
at the Joyce SoHo, 155 Mercer Street; (212) 3523101 or joyce.org.
Dance
Dancing to Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos’s
A Light Conversation
By Deborah Jowitt
Wednesday, October 8th 2008
When the applause died down after Wally
Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos’s collaborative
duet, A Light Conversation, a colleague turned to
me and said in wonder and deep satisfaction,
“two grownups dancing.” This is true. And
rare. Minutes later, walking along Mercer
Street, I remembered a sentence about
Socrates that surfaces in the piece’s sound
score via a taped discussion about the Danish
philosopher Søren Kerkegaard (1813-1855).
Kierkegaard very much admired Socrates—in
part because, as one panelist noted, the
Greek philosopher’s ideas could “rearrange
the furniture in somebody’s head.”
That’s how I felt during and after A Light
Conversation. The title itself is provocative, since
the “conversation” is profound on many levels. But it’s also luminous, and its
moods are movingly delineated by Roderick Murray’s interplay of brightness and
near darkness. Cardona’s program bio mentions that one of his current projects is
teaching a course at the New School called Performance/Phenomenon: Theory and
Philosophy Into Physical Practice, and that title hints at what he probes in this
mysteriously stirring dance.
A Light Conversation is, however, anything but pedantic, and the statements made by
participants in the BBC’s In Our Time With Melvyn Bragg slip around the dancers’
bodies, now floating free, now congruent (remarks, for instance, about
Kierkegaard’s wrestling with the relative merits of the “aesthetic man” and the
“ethical man). One event in the philosopher’s life seems particularly relevant to
the duet. At the age of 24, he fell in love with Regina Olsen and she with him. Yet
he broke off the engagement, perhaps feeling that his gloomy nature would render
married happiness impossible (today, he would undoubtedly be dosed for clinical
depression, depriving us of works like his Fear and Trembling). The same year, 1843,
in which that famous work was written he published Repetition, about a man who
left his beloved.
Continued…
Perhaps you don’t need to know all this to appreciate the duet, but shards of
whatever brought A Light Conversation into being cling to it, and that’s part of its
beauty. The reason my friend can use the word “grownup” so decisively is that the
performers seem always to be thinking—weighing options, untangling ideas. An
outstretched arm is a statement to be considered before moving on. Cardona and
Vonmoos are usually calm and strong within the richly nuanced dancing, although
speed takes them over in one passage when hard-hit drums all but drown out the
cool, British voices, and the two reel about the space as if buffeted by
forces—inner or outer—sometimes snagging on each other. They can’t quite
control these tempests but neither do they yield entirely to them.
In less than an hour, we live through what seem like myriad decisions on their
part. They’re beautiful to watch, tender with each other, and slightly guarded.
Cardona—bearded, erect, and intense—resembles one of Piero della Francesca’s
muscular saints (although without a saint’s certitude). Vonmoos is his equal in
strength, but beside him, she tends to look modest and questioning. Perhaps this
impression is produced by a passage in which they dance separate monologues
opposite each other and at the perimeters of the space; his gestures are large,
hers small; she appears to be ruminating over alternatives, trying to put her mind
in order. Once, they struggle together—not messily, but leaning together in
various ways on a slant and applying enormous pressure. At times, the voices of
the intellectuals on the panel are subjected to pauses in the tape, suggesting. . .
what? Perhaps Cardona’s impatience with their glibness. Later they’re briefly
replaced by his own recorded voice (and Vonmoos’s barely audible responses)
talking in rehearsal. In this deliberately edited dialogue, Cardona never finishes a
sentence or gets to the meat of a thought.
In one of many moments that stop your breath, Cardona moves behind Vonmoos,
pressing himself along by pushing down hard on her extended arm. She leans
against him, her head thrown back while he holds her. He bends his head close,
perhaps whispering to her. No, imprinting his lips on her neck. She doesn’t move.
Later they repeat this sequence, but he doesn’t put his face against her, only leans
her farther back, while the stage goes temporarily dark.
Watching this small, remarkable collaboration, I sense, as if by contagion, the
shadows that beset a thinker’s mind, the moments of illumination, and the
constant struggle between these. The painful contest between desire and what is
perceived as truth lodges in the heart.
Photo: Christian Glaus
Dance has grounded, natural quality
By Tresca Weinstein
Monday, September 20, 2010
TROY – “A Light Conversation,”
choreographed and performed by
Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos,
functions the way one imagines the
mind might work.
First, there’s the constant stream of
thoughts, many of them in conflict
with each other, that runs through our
heads every moment we’re awake. In
“A Light Conversation,” on stage
Friday night and again tonight at
EMPAC, that stream of thoughts is
lifted from a literal conversation—a
BBC Radio broadcast of “In Our
Time,” in which host Melvyn Bragg
interviews three experts on the life
and ideas of philosopher Soren
Kierkegaard.
Granted, most people’s interior
monologues tend to focus more on todo lists than on aesthetics vs. ethics,
worldviews and the many forms of love (all topics touched on in the interview). But Cardona’s remix of
the broadcast to create a sound score for the work seems to mirror the way we think. It repeats itself,
breaks off at one point and resumes at another, slows down and speeds up. Occasionally the conversation is
interrupted or drowned out by bursts of music (Melvyn Bragg, Café Tacuba, Shoji Hano, Jefferson
Airplane), random thoughts claiming center stage for a moment or two before the rational mind takes hold
again.
Then there’s the choreography that accompanies the score—organic, unaffected dancing that ranges from
pedestrian movement to complex partnering, from slow, specific gestures to fast-paced, whirling sections.
Its grounded, natural quality is clearly influenced by Vonmoos’ study of Aikido and Body-Mind Centering
(Cardona’s background as a competitive gymnast is less in evidence). Set against the intellectual discourse,
the dancing reads as an embodiment of the mind’s impulses and emotions, not obvious reactions to the text
but nevertheless connected to it, though in ways that are mostly invisible to observers.
Roderick Murray’s lighting design serves as the outside stimuli to which our minds are constantly
subjected. It runs the gamut from stark to dim to nearly pitch black, frequently shifting from one set of
spotlights to another with an audible click and shifting the collective mindset and perspective as well. The
audience, arranged on three sides of EMPAC’s intimate Studio 1, provides another kind of stimulus; the
dancers make sustained eye contact with those seated in the front rows and are often close enough to touch.
Watching the dancing while listening to an in-depth discussion of philosophical concepts (the title “A
Light Conversation” is winkingly ironic) is like trying to follow two TV shows on a split screen: There’s
no way to take them both in simultaneously, so instead you focus on them in turns. The result is an
experience that seems always to be slipping out of your grasp.
According to one of the experts interviewed on the broadcast, “You can never be quite sure what you read
in his books is what Kierkegaard meant or whether it’s some sort of stunt in order to rearrange the furniture
inside his readers’ heads.” “A Light Conversation” is not a stunt—it’s an earnest, though-provoking
exploration—but it does create some interesting rearrangements, both in its onstage “mind” and in the
minds of its viewers.
Tresca Weinstein is a frequent contributor to the Times Union.
Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos
By Erika Eichelberger
Joyce Soho October 2–5, 2008
The Joyce Soho, usually a slightly awkward openbacked black box, is transformed into a dark
hermetic space, bordered on three sides by the
audience, for Cardona and Vonmoos’ A Light
Conversation. It provides an appropriately intimate
environment in which to witness and reflect upon
their rather heavy conversation.
The piece opens on the two dancer/choreographers
carving thoughtful, often gestural movement
through the space. The recorded voice of Melvyn
Bragg from BBC Radio’s In Our Time discusses
Kierkegaard, the 19th century philosopher who
questioned rather than answered. A forefather of
existentialism, he believed that there was no one
view of the world that was correct.
Cardona and Vonmoos are independent but linked.
Their focus is hyper-present. The way they seem to
sense themselves in space and time recalls Meg
Stuart’s Maybe Forever. It looks as though they
really feel their skin moving through the air, their
bodies and minds moving through minutes.
By drawing our attention to the immediacy of their
experience, the performers echo Kierkegaard’s
emphasis on subjectivity as truth. At the same time,
they drown him out; it is nearly impossible to
concentrate on theory with beautiful moving bodies
in front of us. Accordingly, words are later cut out of the philosophical discussion and meaning is
suspended. Cardona and Vonmoos examine the world around them. They hook elbows and consider the
space between their arms. Soon explosive drums overpower Kierkegaard. The dancers dice the stage in
linear tracks. Their movement is too urgent for analysis.
“According to Kierkegaard, truth is historical, not eternal,” Bragg says. Vonmoos falls back into
Cardona, hands drooping, eyes upturned. He kisses her slowly on the neck. Again, the soundtrack
splinters into incoherence as Bragg and his contributors talk about love.
Toward the end of the piece, the man and woman cling to each other on the floor, holding the audience
captive in their embrace.
Kierkegaard felt he could only illustrate his philosophy by obscuring it. So, too, Cardona and Vonmoos
obscure the philosophy they perform through the immediacy of performance itself.
Photo by Christian Glaus
Talking Dance with Wally Cardona and Rahel Vonmoos
Wally Cardona & Rahel Vonmoos interviewed by Donald Hutera
A Light Conversation is a deft, eloquent and beguiling new duet made and performed by the
American dancer-choreographer Wally Cardona and the Swiss-born, London-based Rahel
Vonmoos, with the audience surrounding the pair on three sides. Below this dynamic duo
reflects on what motivated this collaboration and what they've gleaned from it.
Donald Hutera: How did this creative partnership come about?
Wally Cardona: We first worked together when I made a work for Ricochet. A fifth dancer was needed
and [artistic director] Karin Fischer-Potisk told me about a woman named Rahel who'd danced with many
people, including [frequent Umbrella-supported choreographer] Charles Linehan. I'd seen a Linehan
performance in New York City earlier in the year and enjoyed it immensely. I remember being
mesmerised by a woman performing in it. Karin said, 'That's Rahel.'
Rahel Vonmoos: Funny coincidence: not knowing Wally, I actually stayed in his flat in 1993 while touring
in New York City with a Swiss company. So I'd heard about him and his work. When Ricochet asked if I
wanted to join them for his production, I was curious and said yes. Wally's ability to verbalise his ideas
and the whole working process I found very inspiring. When he proposed that we make something
together, it was very clear to me that I was interested.
WC: I suppose my selfishness initiated the project: I wanted to dance with her. When I look at something,
or somebody, and don't understand what's making it work the way it does, I become very interested. I
want to learn something I don't know.
DH: Under what circumstances was A Light Conversation made?
WC: The circumstances included our distance from each other (my primary residence is in Brooklyn and
Rahel's is in London); our families (neither of us wanted to be away from home and family for long); and
scant financial resources (we didn't receive any grant support). Sounds grim, eh? Luckily, three
presenters/institutions who knew either Rahel or me generously offered their spaces to us to work in:
Tanzhaus Zurich, The Joyce Theater and London Metropolitan University.
RV: We talked a lot about life and dance. It was clear that one of us had to travel each time we would
meet. This we did in four blocks of two weeks over a period of seven months. We had residencies in
Zurich and London, and then a final week in the theatre in New York City before the premiere.
DH: The piece works simultaneously on intellectual, visceral and emotional levels. What were your
intentions?
RV: Well, that seems like a great outcome if the piece is experienced in that way! I'm not sure what kind
of piece I intended to create, but all these aspects were there in the initial working ideas and starting
points.
WC: It was clear to both of us that we're two people who think abstractly and who love to move. The work
would play itself out through movement; us meeting each other, and the conditions we were working
under, would generate the material. The initial motivation was to encounter each other's experience and
create something 'real.' When we were asked to do that horrible thing of 'please describe the piece'
before it even exists, we said, 'Imagine a live documentary that exists of video footage, live as well as
recorded telephone interviews, discussions, scrapbooks and the two of us dancing. Now condense all of
that stuff into just the two of us dancing alone onstage.'
DH: How did you go about devising the movement?
WC: We first got together in a London studio, turned on the video camera and started dancing. I said a
few words and we danced some more. She said a few words and we danced more. That's how three full
days played out, and I think it well represents our process. We're not keen on talking, but when we do it's
usually about our kids, husbands or life in general. Light conversations that can get quite heavy.
RV: A lot of A Light Conversation comes out of those first three days, or is related to the idea of the two of
us 'meeting' and dancing together for the first time. Our relationship before that had been as
choreographer and dancer, so we didn't know each other physically. I find it interesting to look at these
quite raw recordings now and see how, though we've changed, there's something that was there from the
very beginning.
WC: We were also in agreement throughout that the point was not to be the same. Our individuality was
going to be key to our roles.
DH: There's a chemistry between you. What do you think it consists of?
RV: A great mutual respect and interest in the other person. We're there in that space for that length of
time, and intensely together. It was very clear throughout the process that in most aspects we're really
different. It was very intense always having our differences together in the studio; the constant
collaborative decision-making was, at times, a challenge. This might add to the piece on an emotional
level - different characters, different opinions about certain things, different approaches and different ways
of expressing ourselves stopping each other from making habitual decisions. But we had a lot of
agreement as well!
WC: I experience a dynamic chemical reaction with Rahel that's positive, negative and everything in
between.
DH: Location and space are important in your work, Wally. A Light Conversation is simple and
intimate in comparison to some of the pieces I've read about on your website. What determined
the choice of setting?
WC: After making a few large-scale works that dealt with vastness and the use of many objects, I was
eager to revisit people. But that's people as complicated, complex, ever-changing objects. So yes, we
were interested in simple and intimate, but to make space for the complex.
RV: The way we use location comes with the idea of having the audience enter the space the same way
we enter it. Although we choose a clear theatre setting, we're all together in it. Rather than making a
spectacle for the audience, this adds a layer of simplicity and honesty.
WC: An example of our differences: I do see this as a spectacle, a mini-Coliseum with two dance
gladiators in their mid-40's.
DH: What keeps you both in the dance field?
RV: I wanted to quit and do something completely different so many times. But I'm interested in creating
something out of nothing, and I like movement of and in the body.
WC: Oh, my. What a question. My answer would depend greatly on my mood. I like dance, making
dances and dancing. The challenge of all three excites me because it continues to offer a perspective on
experience. By doing it, making it, thinking about it, talking about it, teaching it, writing about it,
remembering it, imagining it as something else - it allows me to attempt to explain the unexplainable.
Wally Cardona/WC4+
By Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Wally Cardona/WC4+
Next Wave Festival
BAM Harvey Theater, NYC
November 17–21, 2009
Reviewed by Eva Yaa Asantewaa
Wally Cardona in Really Real.
Photo by Stephanie Berger, Courtesy BAM
In Really Real, an ambitious collaboration with
composer Phil Kline, Wally Cardona intends to
explore a spectrum of human experience and
relationships. The massive work—launched at
New Haven's 2009 International Festival of
Arts and Ideas—alludes, in part, to the sorrows
of Kierkegaard, whose writings inspired Kline's lyrics. But Really Real most convincingly represents
architectural, not interpersonal, relationship—the body encountering space sculpted by light and voice.
At BAM's Harvey Theater, the faux-unfinished interior appears to be mirrored by movement bearing a
similarly ragged, vulnerable surface in which relationships tend not to gel. Men, though quite impulsive, are prone
to collapse. Women, though vigorous, may be entirely too cleverly self-contained.
Cardona neither adorns his space nor costumes his nimble, expressionless dancers beyond the most casual
street wear. There's no masking, no protection for them, nor for the audience occasionally exposed by Roderick
Murray's unpredictable lighting.
The piece begins as one of Cardona's male dancers, barefoot, wanders out of the wings and kneels. Another
crawls, and a third strolls past the wall. The voiceover text (“He led a somewhat uneventful life”) offers banal
biographical tidbits as the leisurely rearrangement of these and a few more dancers subtly trains our eyes to roam
the expanse of the stage. Murray also addresses the theater's roominess by setting up shady or bright sectors for
performers to inhabit or temporarily dip into.
In a mercurial solo, Cardona moves in the manner of a marionette with paddle-like arms. His springy body
folds and juts. The aesthetics here inform much of the following segments performed by his core septet and, later,
dozens of local dancers.
Dancing unfolds amid the irritating, overlapping chatter of voices reading what sounds like academic papers;
the siren call of Grace Slick's “Somebody to Love” and Cream's “I Feel Free,” issued as if from a distant or dimly
remembered radio; the Brooklyn Youth Chorus's romantic, ethereal vocalizing. Like the opening's drifting
dancers, these sounds shift us in time, memory, and place.
The chorus sings Kline's music first from the balcony, then descends to the aisles. Towards the work's
conclusion, the singers dramatically fill and restrict the stage space. Ducking and dodging amid this grid of
bodies, two dancers enact a furious duet.
Rarely does Cardona's choreography—though brightly performed by Julian Barnett and Omagbitse
Omagbeni, among others—reach that sung-about freedom. This is a work of eventful moments. Perhaps its poetry
is meant to cohere in the mind of each beholder.
Choreographers are mostly too naive or too knowing to be strange. They either mistake their
commonplaces for the unusual or flaunt their originality until it feels like a pose. Weirdo Wally
Cardona, however, is fierce enough in his preoccupations not to care whether anyone shares
them and yet aware enough of dance history not to repeat it. Juxtaposing Kierkegaard,
compellingly disjointed dancing and the sweet voice of youth in his second BAM commission,
the New York choreographer baffles and endears.
Dance may be a synthetic art – steps, music and lighting
blending together for a single effect – but Really Real puts
a premium on autonomy. The 80-minute piece begins with
a teenager on tape stumbling through passages from a
Kierkegaard biography. She is what she is, and the
philosopher is something else: an obstacle to be
overcome. Meanwhile, civilians in street clothes wander
on to the beautifully dilapidated stage to sit or stand as
Cardona moves among them, never touching a soul, his
arms like the Tin Woodman’s, his hips like a snake.
If anything had the power to override the boundaries here,
it would be the oratorio by Phil Kline (composer of the
Unsilent Night boom-box symphony) for the Brooklyn
Youth Chorus. Beginning low and sweet, the harmonies
slowly accumulate into an oceanic wave of innocence .
But the angelic voices, emanating from the balcony
behind us, are too far away to wash over the stage. In
lyrics adapted from Kierkegaard, the children sing: “To transform all this distance into one
normal step into life is the single miracle.” Indeed.
In further divisions, Cardona separates the dances into discrete numbers for women, men and
then couples. (By the time the quasi-romantic duets arrive, we have made our peace with
existential isolation and don’t want them.) Roderick Murray lights the stage in strips and
patches. The choreographer even divvies up the body – curving spine from plank-like arms and
slippery hips.
The dancers fall, however, every which way. Their struggle with grace and gravity is sometimes
droll, sometimes dry and mostly low key, but never boring. Forget what John Donne said.
According to Really Real, every man is an island, and it’s alright.
Photo by Julieta Cervantes
CLASSICAL DIVERSIONS
THE MOST COMPLEX OBJECTS OF ALL: PEOPLE
Editor | Monday, 2nd November 2009
Carrie Stern talks with choreographer Wally Cardona, about his work, Really Real, which is being presented
later this month at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.
It began as a way of controlling the only constant environment in a life filled with dance touring—the theater.
As a soloist, Cardona was aware that each environment affected his work, and the work changed the
environment. “It was an exciting conversation.” But when he added other dancers in 2001 he needed to figure
out how to impart his innate understanding of spatial adaptation. He realized he “wanted a controlled
environment,” a structure, a constant framework for the dancing.
The “ah-ha” moment came in the form of blue floor tape. Laying tape on the floor “created a space-in-aspace.” No matter where the company danced “there was spatial constancy within the inconstancy of changing
architecture.” Three-dimensional elements followed—100s of black four-by-fours, crumpled butcher paper,
large sheets of particleboard—300 objects were moved in a single piece. It “became clear that the objects were
as relevant as the dancers, integral partners within the piece moving as much as a dancer moves.” Dancers and
materials became collaborators requiring dancers to develop “a deep understanding of the materials and how
they react” in order to perform their tasks and navigate their environment safely. In turn, the object’s
sometimes-unpredictable movement qualities lent an element of surprise to the performance structure.
Experimenting with materials led Cardona to develop a creative structure focused on trial and error. Today, he
uses those techniques for experiments built around the relationships of human bodies. Cardona gives
instructions—“I say, ‘start doing this, you’ll hear me talk, just keep going.’ I don’t make what the outcome
should be clear. I put them in the space, get them going—‘here’s some ideas, words, frameworks’—people
move within it; I see how they respond, then offer a new direction or perspective. It’s like throwing a lot of
objects into an experiment and seeing how they react. I’m aware it’s not an experience most people have had
before. I respond to what I’m looking at.”
Cardona calls his new work, Really, Real, his “people piece.” In an email he wrote “It’s the changeability,
inconsistency and warmth a person provides that interests me here. Both what can be known and [what can]
never [be] fully understood. And what more complex of an object exists than the individual?”
Carrie Stern is a dance writer and teaching artist living in Brooklyn, New York
(continued)
Wally Cardona uses a crowd to emphasize individuals
Dancers Stuart Singer, left, Joanna Kotze, Francis Stansky, Wally Cardona and Kana Kimura perform
"Really Real." (Julieta Cervantes)
By TRESCA WEINSTEIN, Special to the Times Union
First published in print: Thursday, June 4, 2009
When choreographer Wally Cardona was invited to create a piece for the Brooklyn Academy of Music's majestic Harvey
Theater, he knew he had to make something big.
The Harvey's illustrious history includes stints as a movie theater and as a traditional playhouse for Shakespearean
revivals and vaudeville revues, as well as a 1988 Architectural Theater Award for its creative renovation, which preserves
the original arched balconies, soaring height and deeply recessed performance area.
"You're dealing with a certain size and scale that invites spectacle," Cardona said. "I was really interested in re-evaluating
for myself an idea of what a spectacle could be and how intimate I could make that."
When it's staged at the Brooklyn Academy of Music during its Next Wave Festival in November, "Really Real" -- the
introspective and thought-provoking "spectacle" Cardona ended up making -- will incorporate 40 New York City high
school students, another dozen local people, live singing by the Brooklyn Youth Chorus performing an original score by
Phil Kline, text from philosopher Soren Kierkegaard and choreography created by Cardona and the members of his
company, WCV.
A scaled-down work-in-progress showing of "Really Real" is set for Saturday at 8 p.m. at MASS MoCA in North Adams,
Mass., following the company's six-day residency at the museum.
(continued)
As it turned out, choreographing a dance that featured a whole crowd of performers enabled Cardona to zero in on
individuals and relationships.
"On some level, I've always wanted to make a piece that was like taking people to a window in Times Square and having
them look down for 20 minutes" at the individual people within the crowd, he said in a recent interview, speaking by
phone from his home in Brooklyn. "I'm not interested in big group dances, like a Chinese Olympic production. What this
piece is ultimately dealing with throughout is, what is the individual and what is the group? By having a larger group
available to me, it was possible to make these much more intimate portrayals of a person or two people."
A former competitive gymnast and Juilliard School graduate who danced for eight years with the Ralph Lemon Company,
Cardona broke away early on from interpreting familiar vocabulary in favor of what he calls "movement invention." In
recent years, he has experimented with using large-scale objects as performance elements and catalysts for choreography:
eight white cubes in 2004's "Him, There, Them"; 300 four-foot black columns in "Everywhere" (2005); and 18 pieces of
fiberboard in "Site" (2007).
"I basically created these environments that were not fixed in the way a set design would be -- they were an integral part
of the movement and the way the piece developed from beginning to end," he explained. "Really Real," however, is
performed on a bare stage with no props (unless you count the many live bodies that inhabit it).
"I had learned so much working with the combination of objects and people that for me it felt radical to get rid of the
objects and concentrate on the people, and working with multiple people I had never encountered before," Cardona said.
Using different local casts for different showings -- the piece has been performed in Connecticut, Florida and Brooklyn
venues -- has offered Cardona "built-in challenges, which means built-in opportunities," he said. It also necessitated a new
way of creating choreography. To come up with phrases for the additional performers, he asked his dancers (Julian
Barnett, Kana Kimura, Joanna Kotz, Omagbitse Omagbemi, Stuart Singer and Francis Stansky) to try going back to a time
before their dance training began to access more intuitive movement.
"In months of working, there's so much that's thrown out the window, but what you're left with is origins -- layers of
history and memories and potential that bubbles into the relationships people have on stage," Cardona says.
At another level, the piece is a response to Cardona's view of traditional dance training as akin to a military operation,
with a group of 30 or 40 students all doing the same thing at the same time as they're led through their paces. With "Really
Real," he allows each of his dancers to be in the crowd but not of it, and at the same time expands their world and the
dance community as a whole.
"For years, I've worked with a small, intimate group and to be actively opening that up and inviting a larger group of
people into the process, into the conversation, has something to do with this time we're in," he said. "It's timely to be
bringing more people into the mix, to have a wider representation as well as to broaden the dialogue."
I have been busy writing and teaching, but I di d go to three cultural events this past weekend: My Lang colleague
Wally Cardona's dance piece 'Really Real' at BAM, the Jane Austen exhibit at the Morgan Li brary, and a reading
by Justin Taylor and one of the Wu Ming collective at P. S. 122. Wu Ming and Taylor--though very interesti ng-does not really go with the other two, but I found odd commonali ties between the Cardona and the Austen.
The Cardona is divided into two parts, "He Lived A Somewhat Uneventful Life" and "Repetition". For the first
(shorter) part, the lights are turned on, so that the audience can see themselves see the performers (I don't know
whether the lights helped or hindered the performers see ing the audience). As a series of small, unobtrusive
actions too k place on stage by a series of dancers, a overvoice--deli berately halting and unass ured--recited details
which, without the name (I believe) ever bei ng explici tly mentioned, clearly demoted the life of Sören
Kierkegaa rd.
The first time we heard the snippets about Kierkegaa rd, we paid rapt attenti on to them, the second time, we began
to drift away, notice the movements of the dancers on stage, hear the sound as only sound but not sense. By the
time the words--spoken with an awareness of both how diff icult the concepts evoked in them could be and for
their potential as cli ché--were said a thi rd time they became meaningless; only the acti on mattered. Then
"Repetition" began--with no words other than songs, the stage darkened, and a series of lyrical, sinuous dances,
peopled by both adult and child performers, took over as a kind of rhapsodic counterpoint and complement to the
more talky and cerebral part that had gone before.
It is interesting to think of the juxtaposi tion of Kierkegaard wi th the emphasis on youth and the presence of the
Brooklyn Youth Chorus as a large part of the action--Kierkegaard is usually thought of not as a phi losopher for
young people, if indeed there is s uch a thing, but part of the show's theme is openness to experience.
The articulation of a lived intellectuality is very different form actuall y living it, and the difference betwee n the
first and second sections was just that: the first was the rationale for a concrete mental life, the second the actually
living it. But the second could not possibly occur without the manifestation of the first, just as, for Kierkegaard,
the 'aesthetic' mentali ty was the necessary prelude to the ethical. Kierkegaard was very unlike many of his
contemporaries who objected to e.g . haggle for not being political or practicable enough--Kierkegaard wanted to
turn Hegel in the direction not just of concreteness but of irony and polyether ti tle,
Really Real suggests three states, the Unreal, the Real. and the Really Real. In this s cheme, the Unreal could be
philosophical abstraction as such, the Real could be an understanding of the need for lived, understood
intellectual experience, the Really Real would be that experience itself. Of course, for some people, li ke Kant and
Lacan, the Really Real would be the most ultimately unknowable, and in a sense there is a kinship between the
most knowable and the most unknowable, conveyed by the moody lyricism, the playi ng of the song "I Feel Free',
which has exuberance, joy, a sense of the unfettered, but also especially in the versi on used by Cardona, an
underlying melancholy. The uniformity of the second half has less to do with collectivism in my mind than the connection necessitated by
the dichotomy of repetition and a more active recollection, which, as all readers of Kierkegaard know, has to be
lived forward. In order for this to happen, the unites that are repeated or recollected have to be standardized, but
the black to me signified the i nevitable sadness that attends on this project as also a sense of the night, the
continued
unknown, a kind of dark, mystical ecstasy. I di d not feel any sense of conformity from the dancers, the diff erences
in ages and features in any event made that impossible.
Part of the liberati on was having the lights turned on the audi ence for the first twenty minutes or so...we felt
relaxed, freed, we no longer needed to pretend we were an audience, pretend we weren't there (though I wished
the woman in front of me whose cell phone went off with the telltale Cingular/At&T ring tone had not been
there).
I did not see the dynamic mentioned by Gia Kourlas in her, to my mind, generall y, albeit unsurprisingly,
uncomprehending Ti mes review about the individual and the collective--to me, the dynamic was betwee n thought
and experience, the mental and the physical, the conceptual and the authentic. Really Real achi eved what its ti tle
spoke of, a release into the freedom of the lived, the actual, but it also showed that this has to be a complicated
and earned and actually performed process, that it cannot be done with a snap of the fingers. It was an
extraordinarily uplifting and stimulating evening and I am most grateful for it.
A day later, I had a strangely analogous experience, going to the Jane Austen exhibi t at the Morgan. Austen, like
Kierkegaa rd, was someone not reall y taken seriously i n her own day: compared to her peers, like Lord Byron and
Sir Walter Scott, she, like the Dani sh thinker, seemed unusually personal, narrow, 'living a somewhat uneventful
life' --the observations made about Kierkegaard in Cardona's play, that he only traveled outside Denmark five
times, that he rarely left home, could also be made of Austen--and they both, sadly, lived only 42 years. Austen
also raises the issue of concrete experience--she has been underrated until the past two generations of critics
because people thought she did not give vent to the Big Ideas, but what she really did is, like Kierkegaard, embed
them in a lived, actuali zed context. As W H. Auden said about her in 'Letter to Lord Byron".
Beside her Joyce seems innocent as grass.
It makes me most uncomfortable to see
An English spinster of the middle class
Describe the amorous effects of brass,
Reveal so frankly and with such sobriety,
The economi c basi s of society.
And this was not just an unmasking but an unmasking done i n order to affirm life and affirm the real ties of
regard and affecti on that could exist even after society's economic basis was granted. Austen and Cardona
combined to underscore the rich braid that is possible between conceptualized and lived experience, if thought of
in, very generally, the right proportion.
The exhibition had Austen’s personal copies of several of the major books that influenced her (a number of which
I am teaching in my eighteenth century fiction course at Lang this semester) as well as s ome of the few
manuscripts of hers that have survived (all of her unpublished, unfi nished work; the publishers threw away the
manuscripts of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE and EMMA, etc., not feeling anybody nee ded them any more). there
also was a set of instructions on courtly dancing--whi ch attracted a group of attendees from the Westchester
Courtly Dancing society, (or some such name), an organization devoted to dance in the Georgian and Regency
era. The woman I talked to at the exhibit said that some dancers liked Jane Austen, and some Austen fans liked
dance, but that the groups did not have an overwhelmi ng overlap. Still, it did provide yet another interesting li nk
between Austen and Cardona.
Posted by Nicholas Birns
DANCE REVIEW
Toiling Hard on a Terrain of Paper and Particle
Board
By CLAUDIA LA ROCCO
Published: May 31, 2007
It’s difficult to pinpoint the
moment when an endeavor
becomes an epic. Often you know it
only afterward, when your sense of
having traveled, or battled, is found
on the worn faces staring back at
you. What was tiring becomes
transformative.
There they were, those expressions,
at the end of Wally Cardona’s
“Site,” which opened Tuesday at
Dance Theater Workshop. Five
dancers, Mr. Cardona included,
were strewn across a rumpled,
chaotic landscape of their own
making — and unmaking.
Andrea Mohin/The New York Times
Bill Manka, left, and Wally Cardona, holding the board, of the Wally
Cardona Quartet performing at Dance Theater Workshop
For 70 minutes they had maneuvered hefty sheets of particle board, wreaked havoc among vast swaths
of brown paper and manipulated their lean, muscled bodies with the painful determination of
individuals suffering from obsessive, driving needs. Their repetitive and seemingly pointless action was
almost too much to watch at times, despite the articulate beauty of their movements. (Julian Barnett, in
particular, is adept at converting the incidental into the momentous.)
They were like strings pulled too tightly, and you waited —sometimes hoped — for that dearly cultivated
control to snap. And then, when it did, moments of strange poetry opened up, blossoming like the
sheets of paper that had been crumpled into unwieldy wads. When Kana Kimura stood bathed in a pool
of warm light, her taut back facing the audience as her arms spread out and up, she seemed at the edge
of a precipice. The others continued their toils.
Just as soon as these moments materialized, the unceasing activity swallowed them whole. Mr. Cardona
has long been interested in such juxtapositions, and he’s found a fruitful pair of collaborators in the
composer Phil Kline and the lighting designer Roderick Murray. Both have worked with him in the past,
but “Site” introduced a new and magical element: the Capital High School Band from Helena, Mont.
Fifteen of the young musicians traveled to New York to perform in the piece, amplifying 50 recorded
musicians. But Mr. Kline’s mysterious, moving score never felt cluttered.
As it, along with Mr. Murray’s design, shifted and bled through various registers, it seemed that the
performers were catapulted into new spaces as well. The effort of following was rewarded in the final
arrival.
“Site” runs through Saturday at Dance Theater Workshop, 219 West 19th Street,
Chelsea, (212) 924-0077, dtw.org.
Big Apple Bites:
On and Off the Beat of a New York Critic
May 2007
Walla Cardona Quartet’s SITE
video clip
website
Richard Serra at MoMA
website
1-1-1-1 (1969) by Richard Serra.
Photo: Jenny Okun; Wally Cardona Quartet: Wally Cardona (behind board) Julian Barnett, kana Kimura, Joanna Kotze.
Photo: Julieta Cervantes
Two very different New York events recently offered some interesting metaphorical and literal intersections. Wally Cardona
Quartet performed Cardona’s SITE at DTW, and uptown, a Richard Serra exhibition opened at MoMA. Cardona continued
culturevulture.net - review
06/21/2007 11:0
his previous work’s examination of process, of materials accumulating and forming other structures. The set for SITE
comprised variously sized sheets of plywood; the right half of the stage was covered with construction paper held together
with blue masking tape, and a marching band from Helena, MT played live but offstage. The compact Julian Barnett
studiously moved larger sheets around the stage, sometimes letting them tip to the floor with a woosh. The men (Bill
Manka, Barnett, and Cardona) wore construction work-appropriate clothes; the women (Kana Kimura and Joanna Kotze),
evocations of a sort, such as form-fitting coveralls. The group collaborated on building a shantytown with some of the
smaller boards, carefully tilting the “walls” as one would with a house of cards. Under the surface bubbled themes of
survival, of dance’s inherent need for rehearsal space (real estate) as a threat to the art form, and of the paradox New
York as both the center of dance and one of the most competetive real estate markets in the world.
At MoMA, three of Serra’s truly awe-inspiring monumental works from 2006 occupy the second floor: Band, Sequence,
and Torqued Torus Inversion. They are arrogant and aspirational in the best way, similar to how the pyramids, Notre
Dame, and the Great Wall transcend reasonable limits of physics and perception. They’re also simple: thick sheets of
steel, covered in a gorgeous textured rust, curved enough to stand alone; welded together at times to make coils and
torques. Their power is not just in their weight and overwhelming size, but in their beauty, and in Serra’s accomplishment
in conceiving of them and getting them created. Walking next to a section that cants overhead induces both lack of
balance and queasiness. Older and smaller works are shown upstairs, including some leather hanging works and steel plate
works playing with a room’s space. Delineator, featuring a plate on the floor, seems like Carl Andre redux until you realize
there’s a matching plate hovering menacingly above on the ceiling. In Circuit II, four plates standing on edge carve a
room into quadrants, leaving a small passage at the theoretical intersection.
But it’s the prop pieces that resonate in the same key as Cardona’s SITE. Serra used sheets of lead and pipes to make
freestanding pieces that must be unstable as they are surrounded by plexi fencing like a herd of rabid sheep. Cardona’s
intent in the ‘tilted’ segment of SITE felt loaded with messages, perhaps because we observed the construction process.
They also relate back to the Judson experimentalists, who presented tasks as performance. Cardona’s choice of prop
materials is so simple, and yet so backhandedly radical. Serra’s tilted-lead sculptures come off more as straightforward
physical experimentation with potentially mild dangerous consequences; a prelude to his giant and extremely threatening
monuments which are the polar opposite of a fleeting dance performance that nonetheless lingers powerfully in the mind’s
eye.
Susan Yung
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The Labor Party
A choreographer engineers the site-specifics of chaos
by Deborah Jowitt
June 13th, 2007 3:12 PM
A city construction site throbs with
enigmatic activity. Erecting a
building is the obvious mission, but
you can't always discern specific
aims amid the bustle of workers,
equipment, and materials. Wally
Cardona's new Site wittily explores a
similar atmosphere. He and his four
splendid dancers (Julian Barnett,
Kana Kimura, Joanna Kotze, and Bill
Manka) spend as much time
wrestling with wood and paper as
they do dancing, and sometimes the
supplies seem to manipulate them.
The opening moments set the tone.
A large rectangle of particle board
set on end lurches toward us across
brown paper panels joined by blue
tape that hang stage left and extend
halfway across the stage. Barnett,
emerging from behind the rectangle,
toils at tipping and rotating it,
leaning against it, letting it fall.
Finally the board retreats, taking
him with it.
y «
g up
t-driven fare
st 7th
ert Sietsema
of nyc
ks
ping
Back in 2005, Cardona's
Everywhere, with its forest of short,
dark pillars, built toward a resolution
of sorts. But in Site's dystopian
workplace, small climaxes and
possible endings thwart the
expectations they raise, and
Cardona deliberately blurs the
distinctions between constructing
and deconstructing. You're never
certain what, if anything, these
laborers are trying so gravely and
attentively to accomplish. At times,
they seem to echo the shapes of the
wooden slabs or to complete a
design. Deliberately, fluently, they
bend their bodies at right angles,
twist their legs in and out, and
swivel, performing even the richest
movement phrases as if measuring
and testing. They often disappear
behind their wooden squares and
rectangles, lie beneath them, and
walk on them. They build a
precariously balanced "house," then
arrange it into extinction. When the
flooring rips, they patch it with more
blue tape. Eventually, it too
becomes material. Manka engulfs
himself in crumpled paper like a
hermit crab. Barnett and Cardona lie
Wally Cardona (behind board), Julian Barnett, Kana
Kimura, Joanna Kotze
photo: Julieta Cervantes
Wally Cardona Quartet, "Site"
Dance Theater Workshop
May 29 through June 2 (closed)
voice > dance > Wally Cardona Quartet's "Site" by Deborah Jowitt
in a pile of it, each of them
blanketed by a board with a woman
treading on it. More wadded-up
paper is toted on.
Far gentler sounds than those heard
at building sites surround the
goings-on. A lone trumpet calls out
in Phil Kline's adventurous score
(sound design by Dave Cook); quiet
piano music seeps in; drums thud.
At moments, you envision a hidden
ensemble of winds, brasses, and
percussion, but it's a shock when 16
members of the Capital High School
Band walk on at the end to take a
bow (when Site is performed in their
home base of Helena, Montana, 50
band members will take part). The
music helps convey the five
performers' touching devotion to
formalized chaos. In the shifting
landscapes created by Roderick
Murray's inspired lighting, you can
imagine their mysterious, yet
concrete actions repeating over
eons.
10/29/2007 03:23 PM
The TONY Blog
Video
Time Out New York / Issue 608: May 24–30, 2007
Restaurants & Bars
Shopping
Mind & Body
SITE for sore eyes
Dating
A choreographer builds a gritty new world with music and hardware-store props.
Travel
By Gia Kourlas
House & Home
Around Town
Art
Books & Poetry
Clubs
Comedy
For his latest dance-installation, choreographer Wally Cardona
has a strict rule about materials: keep them simple. “We are
working with paper, tape and MDF boards, which is a kind of
compressed composite wood,” he says. “If I can’t buy it in a local
hardware store, then I’m not working with it.” He pauses,
laughing. “So, yeah, we have some boards, tape and paper.
Sounds good, right?”
Dance
Film
Gay & Lesbian
Music
Theater
The do-it-yourself approach of SITE marks Cardona’s second
collaboration with composer Phil Kline and his fifth with lighting
designer Roderick Murray. It also illustrates the choreographer’s
ongoing obsession with the conceit of construction and
deconstruction. During the piece, five dancers assemble a set,
moving within a sonic environment featuring musicians from
Capital High School in Helena, Montana. When the piece
celebrates its premiere at Dance Theater Workshop Tuesday 29,
KNOCK ON WOOD Cardona explores his SITE.
16 of the 50 musicians playing the score will appear live (in
Photograph: Michael Hart
Helena this June, all of them will be incorporated). Cardona
spoke about his newest dance landscape in a telephone interview from Montana, where his company was
recently in residence.
Had you worked with students from Capital
High School before?
Not these guys. I did have an encounter with
high-school musicians—I worked with some
snare drummers, and I realized that they were a
valuable resource [in Him, There, Them]. After
that, I began to have a larger fantasy of working
with an entire band. It’s a concert band—
marching is not really their thing. And it’s really
not what I was interested in either.
What were you interested in?
It’s definitely more about hearing them than
seeing them. I think this entire piece deals a lot
with the notion that what you don’t see is as
with the notion that what you don’t see is as
relevant as what you do. There’s a lot of built
obstructions. The musicians are used both as support and as detractors or surprisers. The sound can come
from any place within the theater—and they move around a lot—but you never actually see them move.
Were you ever in a high-school band?
I want to say no, but I was. I played clarinet. I’ve got to say the clarinet is one of the most embarrassing
instruments to play. There’s something about the way you hold it and have to pucker up your mouth, and how
you end up with a puddle of spit between your legs. [Laughs] Not cool. I wish I had done oboe.
How old were you?
Gosh, I think it was fifth grade. I was seriously into it. After the snare-drum piece, a lot of people were like,
How the hell did that happen? But I had encountered that sound back when I was in band. I remember
hearing a snare-drum line warm up and go through their drills, and it was kind of ferocious and fantastic.
Snare drums are frightening! And there’s something about the band [in Montana] that I think Phil is
encountering now: There’s a kind of homespunness to it, and I think that’s really important with what we’re
doing onstage. We’re, at times, building something gorgeous, but it’s only a certain kind of gorgeous—it’s
paper and MDF board. The musicians are playing at their fullest capacity and, as Phil said, “It sounds like
what it is.” I said, “Good, that’s why we’re working with them.” In our separate ways, we’re doing the best with
what we have. I love that.
When you and your dancers are building and deconstructing a set, surprises happen. How do you
deal with potential disasters?
We’re still figuring it out because they keep on happening. [Laughs] We had a whole section worked out, but
we had developed it on a cement floor and, later, we went to a space with a well-sprung dance floor, and
things were crashing all over the place. So there are certain things that we figure out as we move from place
to place, and there are other things in which, yes, it’s just a surprise and mishaps can happen. Some of them
are okay. Some are an acknowledgement of “shit happens—just do it again,” and other times you’re stuck
with it, and you just have to go on. It can either work or not, but when it doesn’t work that is absolutely a part
of the performance as well.
What does the title refer to?
I’m obsessed with building—with the image of those big pits on construction sites that you see on just about
every corner of New York. That title came up because I needed to think of a title, and it just stuck. I never
thought I would settle with it, but everything in the piece just ended up being so much about “Don’t start with
fancy. Just be practical.” Why the hell would I call it anything else?
Wally Cardona Quartet performs at DTW Tue 29–Jun 2 .
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JAN U ARY / FEBRU ARY 2006
GO TO P O R TLA N D! N EW Y O R K I S DEA D
An dr e a L iu
An o pu s o f be gu ilin g an d de c ide dly u n c o mfo r table be au ty, Wally
Cardona juxtaposed a full hour modern dance piece in the context
of a stage of almost 100 three feet tall black wooden pillars placed
in a rectangular grid on the stage. At any given moment, at least
o n e o f th e s ix dan c e r s is pr e o c c u pie d with th e c ar e fu l plac in g o f
th e s e pillar s in th e ir de s ign ate d po s itio n o n th e s tage .
T h e gr id o f wo o de n pillar s be c o me s a pr e s e n c e , a c h ar ac te r ,
a qu as i-dan c e r -e qu ivale n t an d n o t j u s t a bac kgr o u n d pr o p. T h e y
emanate an uncanny presence on stage, as if the human elements
o f th e pie c e th e dan c e r s ar e o n ly wo r kin g in th e s e r vic e o f th is
microcosmic calculus of wooden pillars. The dancers seem beholden
to some unspoken labor allotment scheme that binds them to the
placing or displacing of these pillars into their designated positions.
T h e r e is e ve n a Sis yph u s -like fu tility, a dr o n in g u n -e n din gn e s s ,
to the act of the dancers putting up the pillars. The wooden pillars,
e ar th y mu n dan e n e s s an d pr o n o u n c e d fu n c tio n as in du c e me n ts to
pe de s tr ian labo r , as o ppo s e d to o r n ame n tal o r pr o p de c o r atio n ,
ar e in te r e s tin gly j u xtapo s e d be s ide th e s igh t o f s u pe r mo de l-like
po r c e lain -s kin n e d s c u lptu r ally immac u late dan c e r s . L e ft by
th e ms e lve s , th e dan c e r s migh t h ave be e n c u ltu r ally lo c ate d as
shallow Beautiful People, dressed right out of a chic Soho boutique
we r e it n o t fo r th e in tr igu in g s u bte xt o f th is u n yie ldin g
s u pe r s tr u c tu r e o f wo o de n pillar s an d th e wo r k o f e r e c tin g th e m,
that they seem resigned to being beholden to, almost subservient.
T h e e n tir e tas k is e vo c ative o f s o me pr imo r dial tr ibal alle go r y o r
mo r al le s s o n abo u t c o mmu n ity, in dividu ality an d vu ln e r ability.
T h e mu s ic , by avan t-gar de c o mpo s e r P h il Klin e , s we lls in to
a po ign an t c limax, pr o vidin g a s u gge s tio n o f a n ar r ative ar c an d
a mu te d s e n s e o f tr age dy, o r r e c o ve r e d tr age dy, th at migh t
o th e r wis e h ave e lu de d th e pie c e . Wh at th at tr age dy migh t be is
tan talizin gly le ft j u s t o u t o f r e ac h an d o n ly s u gge s te d, mo s t
me mo r ably by th e c lo s in g mo me n t o f th e pie c e , as o n e dan c e r
climbs atop a mountain of pillars and sits down, seemingly moved
an d o ve r wh e lme d.
Dance finds strength in restrictions
By BARRY JOHNSON
What did the audience think of the Wally Cardona Quartet's performance of "Everywhere" on Monday night at the
Newmark Theatre? Without an exhaustive survey, it's hard to say exactly. But the Time-Based Art Festival crowd,
generally open-minded and generous, responded to Cardona's tense, dark dance with less than explosive applause.
And later, many of the lobby comments were unflattering.
Some may take that as a warning to try some of the festival's other possibilities tonight. But here's a vote FOR Cardona.
The tightly wound "Everywhere" isn't a release from our day's accumulated insults. Yet it understands deeply the restrictions
n life that often generate those insults, and then converts this understanding into a movement attack that grows in ferocity as
the dance unfolds.
In "Everywhere," one restriction is on the set as the audience sits down: The huge Newmark stage is filled with a grid of
square black posts. Each is a little more than waist high and about three dancer-widths from the next (and these are slender
dancers), wide enough to create corridors both for the dancers and the viewers but narrow enough to impede both movement
and vision.
As the dance begins, Cardona himself is making adjustments to the configuration of the grid while the spare, sporadic sounds
of composer Phil Kline clang in the background. Then Joanne Kotze and Kathryn Sanders enter the grid. They begin to explore
its alleys, moving among the posts, and the string quartet Ethel, a hit at last year's festival, begins to play mournfully on either
side of the stage.
Kotze and Sanders alternately swing their arms in complicated figures, big and spasmodic movements that seem perilous given
those posts, or hold them at odd, uncomfortable angles. They execute complicated little phrases, kicking out their legs or turning
in on themselves, before continuing their traversal of matrix. They are joined by Matthew Winheld, whose larger frame only
increases the likelihood that the posts are going to get knocked down as he swings by them.
At no point are the dancers "free" -- either from the imposition of the grid or the difficulty of the choreography.
As the dance proceeds, Cardona is adjusting the post configuration. He picks some of them up and lays them on the ground.
Later he stacks them and creates a T, limiting movement even more.
The sound grows more discordant; the grim-faced dancers continue their painful course; Cardona does more post engineering,
clearing off a section and constructing a wall with the extra posts. This makes it hard to see what the dancers are doing -- and
suddenly it's apparent that restrictions on the dancer are also shouldered by the audience.
When Cardona finally starts dancing he creates that electric force field around his body that dance fans here have witnessed
since he started coming to Portland from New York in 2000, a paradoxical blend of swift amplitude and taut control. But as
the soundscape becomes more sporadic again, the movement becomes almost glacial. When another dancer enters, Kana
Kimura, more serious post work begins: Soon the primary activity on stage is the construction of a large staircase from the
posts -- many of them having been deliberately knocked over by Cardona and company.
This all plays out in something more than 60 minutes. There's no respite, either from the oppression of the grid or the dark and
jangly atmosphere created by the music. The final tableaux of the dance isn't joyful by any means, but perhaps it offers some
comfort, if simply a moment of rest.\
I like this relentless tough-mindedness, both in Cardona and in the dancers who execute his devilish choreography with such
intense focus. It's tiring for everyone in the theater because there's no refreshment, no long uncluttered passes across the stage
to get our sympathetic motor synapses popping along with the muscles of the dancers. "Everywhere" is thorny -- and admirable
for just that reason.
12.07.05
EVERYWHERE
2005 Next Wave Festival
Brooklyn Academy of Music
BAM Harvey Theater
651 Fulton Street between Ashland Pl. & Rockwell Pl.
Through December 17; December 15 performance reviewed
In 2003, Wally Cardona was commissioned to create a special dance piece for the Brooklyn Academy
of Music’s marvelous Harvey Theater. The result is the innovative EVERYWHERE, a work that
challenges both the dancers and the audience. While the crowd slowly filters in, choreographer and
dancer Cardona walks determinedly across the large stage, adding three-by-four black columns to
rows and rows of them as Phil Kline’s boomboxes — some fifty that are placed throughout the hall
— release staccato sounds as if they have an artistic form of Tourette’s. Ultimately, the lights go
down, the string quartet Ethel begins playing its screeching alternative classical music in the old
box seats next to the stage, and Joanna Kotze and Kathryn Sanders start dancing their way around
the columns, methodically moving horizontally, vertically, and diagonally, backward and forward,
fast and slow, gracefully floating between what could be seen as a sea of unmarked graves,
nondescript city skyscrapers, or a dark, ominous maze from which there’s no escape. Soon Matthew
Winheld joins them, with Cardona now moving the blocks around like a big autistic kid, carefully
placing them on top of each other and creating new paths for the dancers, who remarkably avoid
knocking any of them over — until deconstruction begins, to be followed, of course, by reconstruction
and a special surprise. As difficult as it is for the dancers to create their unique language in the
constricted, ever-changing space, it is also hard for the viewer not to get caught up in the drama
between the animate and the inanimate, human being and three-foot block, so we’re never quite
freed from the feeling of impending danger at every turn. In fact, when a dancer does actually knock
over one pylon unintentionally, there’s an inaudible gasp from the audience, and it’s almost impossible
not to keep looking at the fallen column — until Kotze, much later, incorporates it into the absolutely
thrilling finale. Even at seventy minutes EVERYWHERE is still probably too long, but it’s like
nothing else you’ve ever experienced.
DIAL UP THE FUTURE?
by Deborah Jowitt
Wandering through downtown's out-of-whack worlds in search of sense and beauty
Once upon a time, you could apply adjectives like "sensual," even "voluptuous,"
to Wally Cardona's dancing, although there was always a tigerish tenseness
in it. As his movement style has become more intriguingly original, it has
also gotten more unyielding—enigmatic and single-minded at the same time.
He and the members of his quartet often swing their arms as if the shoulder
were the only joint in them; their legs, too, appear more often straight than
bent. Intense, articulate of limb, the dancers are always aware of one another,
but seldom connect physically. It's startling when, in the second section of
the new Him, There, Them, Matthew Winheld lays his head in Kathryn
Sanders's lap and, a few feet away, Joanna Kotze copies his move without
a lap to receive her.
The set involves different arrangements of white cubes on white strips of
flooring and—for "Him" and "There"—patches of fake grass. "Him" is
intermittently accompanied by the powerful unison snare-drumming of seven
young uniformed marching-band members. For "There," pianist Cameron
Grant sparingly deconstructs Brahms amid long silences, eventually battling
Romulo Gaitan's "Recorded Music Mix," which takes over for "Them." The
cool atmosphere, abetted by Roderick Murray's lighting, is often one of
waiting: for a sound to fall into the quiet, for someone to move.
Cardona is severe, almost stoic in his opening solo, staring forward as he
essays different balances and restricted actions on and around the cubes—
using one leg as an oar, leaning slowly until he topples. In one strange
outburst, his fists rage, but his body cringes. It's as if, within this limited
arena, he's fulfilling set tasks. When the others join him for "There," they
give the impression of being out of touch with the notion of community and
the point of their "jobs." They jitter, totter, fall, and twitch; they swing their
arms relentlessly, shuffle along stiff-legged, execute spraddled hops and
stamps, and pair up briefly. Bending over, they scrub at the grass with the
backs of their hands. Their faces remain determinedly neutral, intensifying
the robotic aspect of some of the steps.
In "Them," a duet for Cardona and Sanders, the score at times makes you
think a song is about to burst out, but it never does. And the dance is a little
like that too. There are more curves in this part, but the two are alone
together, making gestures that involve their own bodies. It's a surprise when
they briefly fit into unison. While he dances, dropping into somehow aghast
falls, she stands, hands folded. This disturbing, oddly beautiful world isn't
one I want to live in, but maybe I already do.
April 5th, 2004 3:30 PM