Le Flash-Atlanta: worlds collide in dance with Lauri Stallings’ “Pour” by Cynthia Bond Perry

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Le Flash-Atlanta: worlds collide in dance with Lauri Stallings’ “Pour”

By Cynthia Bond Perry | Oct 5, 2009

Last Friday, in Castleberry Hill, Lauri Stallings and her collaborative performance group gloATL offered a new site-specific work, “pour,” for Le Flash-Atlanta. Part of the city’s second annual one-night celebration of contemporary art, Le Flash ushered in the month-long Atlanta Celebrates Photography festival. (Read Cathy Fox’s visual art review here.) One of ACP’s goals is to help Atlanta to become a world-class cultural center — lucky for the festival that the city is home base for an emerging internationally recognized choreographer.

I’ve seen three works by Stallings over the years: “big,” “rapt” and now “pour.”

Though all are multi-layered and rich in imagery, “pour” is the most cohesive, captivating and emotionally daring. With each new piece, Stallings’ language grows more fluent and articulate, with images more specific and meanings more distilled. From an inner source, it seems she’s extracted and refined a flexible, fertile, organic language. (Top photo by Joeff Davis.)

Honesty cuts through falsity, and the expression is unique and fresh, with endless possibilities. (Disclosure: Stallings recently joined the faculty of Kennesaw State University’s Program in Dance, where I teach.)

Worlds collide in Castleberry Hill, the old warehouse-turned-arts-district at the edge of downtown. Streets intersect at odd angles and decaying brick buildings stand near sleek, new, unfinished ones. Through backstreets and empty spaces, gloATL took viewers on an unpredictable journey. Stallings’ company of deeply committed, intensely focused professional dancers, Dave Balliet’s subtle lighting and Bruce Harlen’s simple staging created starkly contrasting worlds — and each world became a lens through which to see ours more clearly. (Lower photos by Adam Davila.)

Initially, the journey seemed childlike, innocent. A petite Nicole Jones, dressed in a black suit and sneakers, sauntered down Bradberry Street, her long strides punctuated by sweeps and thrusts of arms and legs, elegant, breezy suspensions and breathless halts.

Effectively recalling images from “big” and “rapt,” Big Rube (from the OutKast/Dungeon family) recited his def poem “Ruby 4,” while Jones walked with him hand in hand. Stripped to the essence, it was the most poignant and natural blending of def poetry and Stallings’ choreography I’ve ever seen. As a delicate, pensive Bach “Prelude in C Major” played, the ephemeral gift of a green egg floated skyward.

Cameras flashed as several dancers, clad in April McCoy’s romantic tutu designs, tumbled up the alley between Haynes and Mangum streets. In a flurry of anticipation, their bodies seemed to light up as if fireflies flashed inside. As these fantastical beings led, we followed, through an enchanted world up the alley and across Nelson Street.

The crowd headed into an unfinished building, a stark, triangular space of concrete, steel and glass. As music pounded, a hanging mesh of fluorescent lights — Jason Butcher, Scott Carter and Mario Schambon’s “Fiat Luxe” — bore down on the black-suited dancers. The unrelenting hammering seemed to command their bodies, as they exposed their chests with open jackets and then closed jackets protectively.

Fleeing to an enormous empty interior space punctuated by a line of straight pillars, it felt as though humans were at odds with a bleak, harsh world. Under a shower, to Marion Black’s “Who Knows,” an up-and-under blues rhythm seized Nicole Johnson’s body as water poured over her — exposed, but not sensual.

Moving down the extent of the long, narrow cavity, with dirt and gravel underfoot, each section escaped from one space to the next. Images collided — a tense, rush-hour street scene, a power struggle. In a solo, Toni Doctor Jenkins desperately spun and fell, as she bathed in dust, seeking but not finding water.

In a final section, Arvo Pärt’s “Tabula Rasa” rolled and churned as 12 dancers played out a gripping sequence of emotions — tilting, twisting and running urgently, they lashed, swept, undulated, fell and rolled on a bed of green turf. It felt like a struggle to keep one’s humanity intact in a bleak, automated, dehumanizing world.

Escaping to a cool, open courtyard, dancers found solace in water, as one dancer, behind a sheet of falling water, laid her hands against a smooth stone wall. How satisfying to arrive at this cool, calm space after the fury had played out.

Though at times action was difficult to see, and credits were missed, in all, “pour” was a revelation.

8 Comments

Terry

1

“…a stark, triangular space of concrete, steel and glass…” and DUST!
the gloATL performance was amazing, I still don’t know what to make of it. I want more.

05 Oct
Diana

2

I want to bring the context of “Pour” into the conversation. After all, it was presented as a public work. It was part of Le Flash, a festival consciously bringing a multitude of public art works into a changing neighborhood. Such a festival and such a dance asks us to look at how art works in the specific site.
As Catherine Fox’ article on Le Flash points out, while a mass of audience members awaited the second performance of “Pour,” three young breakers began a spontaneous show in the street. A circle formed around them. They invited the crowd to join in the act of dancing with them. I loved watching one of the young men consciously invite an older, red-haired woman to dance with him and then seeing them partner one another.
The spontaneous, albeit restrained, dance party in the streets consisted of a number of individuals from different communities consciously sharing in one event, the dance.
“Pour” also began unannounced. I did not see Nicole Jones enter the scene and begin the dance. I only heard someone directing me to follow along, and so I followed. I guess that a hundred people followed too. Not more than twenty of them could have seen her. Compared with the inclusive circle of the breakers, the wild chase after glimpses of a fleeting dancer felt uncomfortable. Were we being led on? Teased? Excluded?
Whatever the case was, I did begin to enjoy the chase. The choreography of the crowd was delightful. I have never seen Atlantans move through the streets with such agility and speed. We wove through one another, cutting each other off, trying not to collide, hurrying for a place in front, as we raced to see the young dancer up ahead. Meanwhile, the photographers ran alongside us, trying to get the right shot and falling behind before racing ahead again.
We went so quickly that I could not even keep track of what streets we were on. I did not see what we passed or where we were. I lost awareness of the place. Where was I? Who was around me? My confusion led me to see the event and the festival from a different point of view.
When Jones joined Big Rube, walking hand-in-hand down the street, a man behind me began jokingly impersonating the hip-hop artist. I’m not sure if he was making fun of himself or Big Rube. Either way, I felt like I was at a bar in Virginia Highlands at Happy Hour, overhearing the obnoxious young man who just got off work at the next table. Yet we were not at a bar in Midtown. We were running down the streets of Castleberry Hill.
I don’t think the man realized that no physical barriers existed between him and the performers. Everyone could hear one another . . . if only they chose to listen. The man was not the only viewer commenting on the performance. The crowd was full of commentators.
“Pour” became a meta-dance. It commented on itself. Stallings’ choreographed sequence was merely a small dance within a larger performance work. The larger work included the scenery – the art galleries next to the night clubs with dramatically different populations inside. It included the sound score of viewers’ comments. It included the audience’s movement.
I wonder how much the viewers took note of the dance in which they were participating. As we chased the lone dancer, later joined by the other performers, the folks around me seemed so interested in catching Stalling’s choreography that they missed the larger dance of crowd. I don’t know if they realized how they were moving through streets, weaving through one another with a keen spatial awareness. I don’t know if they listened to the sound score of one another’s comments. I don’t know that anyone else noticed the art gallery and the night club next to each other, serving dramatically different, and more importantly separate, populations. The movement, sound and scenery became a blur in the rush of the chase.
If one did remember to notice the movement of the crowd, the sound of their comments and the strange scenery, the dance became quite a commentary on Atlanta and on Le Flash. Disparate groups were thrown together in a quick blast of artistry.
While Ms. Stallings certainly created the means for me to experience the dance of the crowd, I am not sure how aware she was of her action. When the dancers led us into a building and the conventions of performance became more and more recognizable, I grew disapointed. When the dancers stripped to white underclothes – a costume trick used by many ballet companies, who share a European heritage – to “Sinner Man” – a song famously used by Alvin Ailey in 1962 when he created an “acceptable” ballet for black dancers to perform in upscale theaters – and jumped in the water, I became convinced that Ms. Stallings did not realize the commentary that her dance through the streets embodied. Like the crowd that followed her dancers through the streets, she seems to have gotten lost in the dance. Perhaps she did not notice the historical baggage and list of associations that comes with each of these elements of the dance. She forgot about “the scenery.”
Since this work was part of an arts festival whose partial mission was to illuminate the neighborhood for an evening, I want to ask, “What are we illuminating?” Did we really all just visit Castleberry Hill to ignore the details and the history of the city blocks through which we were moving? Did we go there just to see tropes of international ballet companies mixed with appropriations of other cultures and imposed upon a local neighborhood?
I applaud the festival and the dance for putting such well-produced and sophisticated art in the public realm. Now that it is there, it has to take into account the neighborhood. We, as artists and art-goers, have to become more self-aware. Otherwise the art becomes a self-perpetuating cycle of the same works rather than a culturally relevant conversation that happens nonverbally.

05 Oct
Jim

3

My perception of Ms. Stallings objective leads me to a somewhat different interpretation. This was created as a ‘site specific’ work, with the prime objective of focusing crowd attention not just to the dance, but the surroundings as well. In effect, she choreographed a work that attempted to blend dancer, place and audience into a single cohesive scene.
Talking to some of the dancers post performance, they seemed thrilled with the audience’s active participation…that the audience got it, at least for the most part.
I will agree that taking in all aspects of place, dance and audience involvement simultaneously is challenging at times, but I for one, came away with a great appreciation for not only the skill of the dancers, but also the uniqueness of the Castleberry Hill district and the reaction from the crowd.
Would love to see more of this!

05 Oct
Cynthia Perry

4

Diana,
I appreciate your perspective on “pour” — and how clearly and descriptively you point out context and environment. What’s marvelous about this kind of work is that unlike most theaters where the audience is neatly seated in rows facing a proscenium stage, the environment offers multiple perspectives. Personally, I like the references to Western culture — the romantic tutus, the white underclothes. They seemed to anchor a very progressive work in its own tradition. And the use of “Sinner Man,” which already has double implications in “Revelations,” (escape from sinning self, escape from slavery) added yet more layers of meaning in the new context. I think this was intentional.
So good, and healthy for the arts scene to share different points of view. Feel free to post any time….

05 Oct
Joseph Futral

5

Philosophically, what I think this work offered was a postmodern opportunity for the audience to engage the work on their own terms, granted some means may have had more obstacles than others. One could follow along closely, even almost as a participant, from a distance or voyeuristically, or (as my wife and I did) jump ahead and wait for the dancers to arrive at the final stop. (It was way past our bedtime and we were tired!)
Choreographically, this requires a great deal of courage to surrender a large part of control that many performing artists maintain in a traditional theatre setting (although many fail to utilize). Whether Lauri and company structured with this intent, I couldn’t tell you. But I do think this underlying postmodern philosophy is what is causing so many art forms today to suffer. No one wants to surrender control and the audience is getting tired of being manipulated (often with unsatisfying results) in the traditional forms. Just ask the recording industry.
As a work of art, I agree with the perception of a meta-dance. The result was decidedly more than the dancers and their specific movement, even more than just site specific. Again, whether the choreographer intended that I couldn’t say, but I think that was the result. But more interesting questions to me are did the audience see that? Should they have? Is art’s influence best left unnoticed?
From one perspective the “product” of art is not necessarily the work itself, but what the viewer leaves feeling. That is what they take home. In that regard it is impossible to extricate the work from the environment because it affects how the piece is viewed. And the work did not strike me as at odds or in conflict with the environment, ambiguous beginning not-withstanding. Nor did the environment seem superfluous.
My opinion of the work. What I saw I enjoyed. The only parts that bothered me were the beginning and the ending. The beginning because I never saw it actually begin or what was happening until a few blocks later. We just followed the crowd hoping to catch up or catch on. Regardless of what one thinks of that being part of the piece, it was unsatisfying. Well, not unsatisfying as much as discouraging.
And the ending, while I would have been disappointed if the piece ended somewhere other than the fountain (the title is “Pour” after all) it was a bit cliche and somewhat disparate from the rest of the work.
But to my over all impression of the work those are relatively minor quibbles and easily consumed by the rest of the dance. The work was what much art today fails to be, interesting and engaging. And I think this is evident in the excitement of the audience who not only anticipated this particular work, but also seems to anticipate future experiences with dance and Lauri Stallings in particular. Kudos for a difficult accomplishment.
Joe Futral

05 Oct
Big Rube

6

This was an awesome event!!!

05 Oct
Chip Epsten

7

Did Lauri structure the piece with the intent to surrender a large part of control? Well, not exactly. It’s more about placing trust than surrendering control. Trust that we would follow the dancers, make way for them, kick the green balls around with them. Lauri is developing a language for site-specific work that in part is about interactions with the crowd. We become part of the performance environment, the edges are blurred as dancers move through and bump into us. We’re invited in, when a dancer runs right up to one of us, or even invites us to dance. And if that trust implies risk – that some little accident will happen or someone won’t cooperate – they’re counting on us to work it out. It’s a collaboration.

05 Oct
Joseph Futral

8

Chip,
I like that distinction and from Stallings, I think it is appropriate. I find it is a vocabulary many contemporary artists (such as Makoto Fujimura) are seeking to employ and one that is anti-thetical to Modern Art, philosophically at least. The relationship between community and artist is more often than not contemptuous in Modernity. It is that relationship that I believe has placed art in the difficult situation it finds itself today. Artists like Stallings, I believe, are responding to that issue.
Joe

05 Oct

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