Between Dance and Theatre

by Henry Hughes
Review of "Self Portrait" as performed by Miro | Dance. Theatre. on May 5th, 2008 at the Philadelphia Museum of Art
Images courtesy of Miro | Dance. Theatre.

Amanda Miller of Miro Dance Theatre stepped onto a platform in front of the Art After 5 crowd at the PMA last Friday. Immediately, she posed and was hit with the bright light of two overhead projectors. Her feet, nestled in piles of flowers and a few scattered personal effects. Her smiling face glanced over everyone sitting on the steps. She stood, poised and ladylike, hands on her hip, ready to be a star.

What followed was a combination of dance, performance, and video, with a strong element of narrative throughout. Miller’s body contorted between pain and discovery, confusion and enlightenment. Overhead projectors became d.i.y. live video tools; member of Miro used markers on sheets of mylar, painting on Millers body as her hands directed the path of the phantom color.

The narrative followed the life of Frida Kahlo, however, the performance told a story of it’s own. Whether it was based on fact or derived from fiction did not necessarily matter. The performance had on point timing, as well as an ongoing spectacle. Initially, the live animation of the overhead projector had the capacity to be a bit gimmicky and loose its luster by the end. But the Miro troop denied that possibility. As Miller seemingly began to fall apart, a wet brush wiped away the paintings and marks. Paper with small slits projected a bizarre piercing background. At the sound of glass breaking, Miller started flinching as if she was that glass and quick marks of a pen visualized that cracking across her body. Moments like these blended three separate entities into one seamlessly.

Miller turned from naïve to self aware to self destructive, where at times her character seemed to forget she was in front of an audience, then painfully realize it again. It was internal and external, forced and fluid.

Self Portrait, while related to the current Kahlo exhibition, was an interesting choice by the PMA, who commissioned the piece. While jazz, beer, and handsome foods tend to put a glossy finish on the museum and the Art After 5 program, the performance added a necessary a bit of grittiness. Hopefully, there will be more to come.

[Henry Hughes is an artist who haunts around Philadelphia. Miro Dance Theatre's upcoming "Conco De Miro" benefit takes place on May 9th, 2008. Click here for more information.]


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The Void of Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suib's "Black Hole"

by Henry Hughes

While Black Hole by Nadia Hironaka and Matthew Suid primarily presents a feast of high definition images and a strange narrative evocative of David Lynch, it’s most interesting accomplishment is within it’s presentation: the void.

Upon walking into the dark room and viewing the video, it’s a quick linear thought that links the title to the image of a hole in a wall sucking in dust particles. This, you think, is the black hole. But when you sit on the bench, 7 feet away from the screen, and the video fades to black, another black hole emerges. Rather than the standard rectangle of projector “black”, which often brings us back to the reality of being in a darkened theater or room, we are presented with an ominous grey cloud, a void floating in a space that is both just in front of us and completely foreign and distant.

James Turrell offers us this same phenomenon in pieces such as Catso, Red (1967), or A Frontal Passage (pictured right), where light becomes a dimension, a plane which we are not sure how to process. With Black Hole, this void becomes an entryway into what follows. We are put into a realm that is unknown to us, which makes everything else in it believable as a reality. It suspends the thought that Black Hole is a video: it becomes another set of eyes rather than a window. This notion is also enforced with some rather dream-like imagery (a bird flapping helplessly in space, which may or may not be a computer generated image), and at points deconstructed (moments when the blur of the frame is disrupted into a hard edge by bright light).

It is interesting to think of how the piece would be altered when viewed on a monitor; when the frame is reestablished and it’s objectivity takes a higher position. The same feeling and question came to mind after seeing Michal Rovner’s Fields of Fire at Pace Wildenstein in New York a few years ago, in which the reality of the room was lost due to the nature of the presentation (there were no bright colors in the video, causing the room to be especially dark). Like Black Hole, it all came down to that sublime moment of being lost in the act of viewing. This moment is all too often lost within video, where the focus is primarily on filmmaking or an action being performed, rather than an experience.

[Henry Hughes is an artist who occasionally lives and works in Philadelphia. Black Hole is on view at Vox Populi through March 30th]



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