Pamela Z and Christine Bonansea at Space 124

Christine Bonansea (from the home page for her Web site)

Last night at Space 124 in the Project Artaud building, Fresh Festival 2019 presented a duo performance bringing the music of Pamela Z together with Christine Bonansea, dancing to her own choreography. The advance material for the event gave it the program title The Body | The Voice | The Space; but there was neither sign nor mention of that title at the venue. Nevertheless, the space was very much a part of the performance. Very close to an imposing high cube in its proportions, the performing area accommodated seating at a variety of different locations, almost as if the layout had been calculated to ensure that different members of the audience would be left with different impressions. I have been to gallery-based performances in which the viewer could move around to experience things from different perspectives; but, given how much of the space Bonansea used, it was clear that the audience was not expected to be mobile.

The “voice” was, of course, that of Z herself. Working with her usual gear of sensors, loudspeakers, and computers for both transforms and control, most of her “inputs” were those of her own voice. They involved both speaking and a wide range of non-pitched and pitched singing in styles ranging from “casual folk” to finely polished operatic. Much of the control work involved mixing the inputs to create elegantly multilayered textures that were seldom (if ever) strictly contrapuntal but always made for a thoroughly engaging mix. Indeed, Z’s solo work emerged as the high point of the evening with such a strong draw on attention that any dance taking place at the same time would have been distracting.

When my attention shifted to Bonansea, I felt as if I was being transported by a time machine back to that prodigiously creative decade of the Sixties that Don McDonagh documented in his book The Rise and Fall and Rise of Modern Dance. More specifically, I found myself thinking of McDonagh’s account of those choreographers struggling to figure out where to go in the wake of the revolutionary impact of Merce Cunningham on the very nature of modern dance. Even more specifically I felt as if I was revisiting all the different ways in which I was reacting to my first encounters with choreographers such as Yvonne Rainer and Twyla Tharp (whose earliest work was almost violently opposed diametrically to much later contributions that would end up on Broadway).

Those were the days when those of us eager to embrace the iconoclastic lived by the catchphrase from T. S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” poem:

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”

Let us go and make our visit.

Watching Bonansea at work reminded me of many of the visits I had made half a century ago. To be fair, however, those visits were rarely (if ever) about “instant enlightenment.” More often than not, they were provocative, frustrating, aggravating, and usually far longer in duration than one would wish to tolerate. Nevertheless, for those of us who persisted, frames of reference would gradually emerge. If we were going to see Rainer, we knew what to expect, and satisfied expectations gave way to new provocations, which, in turn, led to revised expectations. Trying to write about such experiences was no easy matter; and, to this day, I am glad that I had dance reviewers like McDonagh to provide models for my own efforts.

With that as context, I can say that I was never really aggravated with Bonansea, nor was I particularly provoked. Because she made it a point to use as much of the space as was feasible, however, I was often frustrated with the uncertainty of where I should be looking at any given time. Nevertheless, I came away with my “first contact” experience of Bonansea’s work with a few promising seeds of satisfaction.

I was glad to see that she did not feel obliged to maintain the intimidating self-serious airs that seemed to suit both Rainer and Tharp. She added the vertical axis to her work by climbing a ladder up the full extent of the wall that was concealed by curtains. Single limbs would then protrude from those curtains in a variety of different awkward angles, making somewhat for a physical embodiment of witty surrealism. Indeed, when Bonansea’s face finally appears through one break in the curtain, it had a wistful look that was a great relief from the deadpan foundation beneath all of her other facial expressions.

All of these activities tended to fit well in the auditory environment that Z was creating. I suppose one reason that aggravation was assuaged was that, if I could not make heads or tails out of what I was seeking, I could simply cede priority to my ears and take in the abundant macro-features and micro-features of the many textures Z was creating. On the other hand, I would be curious to see if last night will mark the beginning of a more consistent partnership, such as the one between Cunningham and John Cage that laid the groundwork that made the Sixties such an adventurous decade.