AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION: Jasperse invoked old strategies. |
The open space at the Concord Scout House a week ago Thursday was filled with 24 clear plastic air mattresses lined up in six neat rows plus a lot of other stuff, all flanked by a single row of chairs along two facing walls. There wasn’t much room for much dancing, but John Jasperse’s Prone, which had four performances at Concord Academy Summer Stages Dance, wasn’t intended as a showcase for the performers. The dancers, musicians, and technical assistants played the role of facilitators, working to give the audience a variety of sensory experiences.Jasperse’s piece isn’t exactly a throwback to the 1970s, but it returns to a whole series of potent countercultural ideas having to do with reawakening us to the energies around and within us — the way we see and hear, the way space changes with weather and light, the feeling of our skin, our weight, our tensions, our dormant terrors.
History never quite repeats itself, though. The ’70s “awareness” movement was deliberately spare and open-ended. You got in a room with a few other people and worked on one problem. Performances surrounded the audience. Theatrical visions lasted a long time and changed imperceptibly. You had to pay attention. Now we seem to need more assistance to get stirred up. Jasperse invoked old strategies, but it took a lot of artifice to activate them.
Polite ushers took shoes, bags, and programs, then showed 24 people, exactly half the audience, to their mattresses. Midway through the piece, the ushers helped the “prone” (actually supine) people off the floor and guided them to an exchange of places with 24 people who’d been sitting on the chairs.
At the beginning, oversized soap bubbles, actually a couple dozen inflated plastic bags, burst through the doorway and were pushed into the room by three dancers, Luciana Achugar, Levi Gonzalez, and Eleanor Hullihan. They tossed the bubbles across the space, over the 24 “prone” subjects, reserving three bubbles for the first movement episode. Between the mattress rows, they collapsed over one another until their weight deflated the bubbles.
Stuffing the used-up plastic under three mattresses, they knelt down and bent over the reclining subjects, scrutinizing them with clinical concern. They got up and walked around inspecting the other people on the mattresses, then did a sequence of slow tumbling, teetering moves, over and near the mattresses, never once touching a prone person.
For the next hour or so, the dancers hovered and rolled around in the trenches between the mattresses and giant-stepped across the bodies. Eerie sounds were plucked and scraped and sampled from a triangular stringed instrument by composer Zeena Parkins. A woman straddled a mattress, impassive and provocative, with a light bulb under her skirt.
The people on the mattresses, fixed flat on their backs, submitted to these intrusions on their space and were engulfed in fantastic effects: distorted reflections in 12 overhead Mylar panels, puffs of air issuing from vents in the mattresses, aromatherapy compresses placed over their eyes. Watching Parkins from my chair, I brushed off what I thought was a moth landing on my neck. It turned out to be Gonzalez, who was stealthily moving behind the chairs, nuzzling spectators.
