#tereoconner

Tere O’Conner has made it clear that his work is not something to be decoded and when you “get it” you get a prize at the end. It intentionally resists closure and reductionist narrative reads. In other words, it is not a “solve-for-x” answer to a formal problem. And yet. Sure enough, after O’Conner’s show at ADF the other night, my companion concluded, “of course the work has narrative.” Meanwhile, my response had been full-on hallucinatory, expansive, indexical. I’m pretty sure O’Conner would have been cool with either of our takes. I did not have a notebook with me during the show – no notes taken – so what I ended up capturing via this text is more my reception of the work than a recap of what actually occurred. Fellow audience members, your mileage may vary.

The theater at the Rubenstein at Duke is a relatively intimate space compared to, say, the Bryan Center, so a feeling of being-together and human connection while watching Tere O’Connor’s show at ADF the other night was palpable. A recurring motif throughout the evening involved moments when single or multiple performers stood and simply faced the audience, underscoring that sense of intimacy. These simple acts of facing the audience sometimes manifested as suspended interludes or interstitial signals midway through the execution of one of the choreographic “sets” that serve as the building blocks of O’Conner’s works and effloresce and unfold as in(ter)dependent dialogic units. Other times, performers faced the audience to mark a transitional phase, active pauses before another cluster of choreographic terms were introduced. These direct encounters never felt confrontational (although the act of coming face-to-face can literally be understood in con/front/ational terms). But here was a valuable revelation: face-to-face is not the same as in-your-face. These were disarming moments. They actually felt like welcoming moments. As if in those moments the performer(s) were inviting us to grain more deeply into presence (theirs and our own) and perceptual porousness (theirs and our own) – a punctuative operation wherein dancer(s) served as stationary node(s) lighting up a hypothetical electrical grid of intersubjectivity among all who were present in the space.

Each of these phases/transitions felt fresh, like a renewal. This had as much to do with the the integrity of the performers, each of whom viscerally and compellingly held the space as conduits of their own subjectivities and physicalities, as it did with O’Conner’s compelling choreographic vision. But it must be said that the activated quality of the dancers is integral to that vision. O’Conner has often described the importance of who is performing his work. He does not create dances in which the dancers are impersonal cogs in a choreographic machine. Rather, he seeks out individuals who bring integrity and generative capacity to the process. All of this was in full effect and visible throughout the performance at ADF, from extraordinarily tight, complex unison patterns in which the performers also amazingly manage to retain and express individual idiosyncratic differences to the aforementioned adventures in frontality.

The evening included two pieces, Construct-A-Guy and The Lace – works that bookended O’Conner’s choreographic life – his first and his most recent. One of my first responses to Construct-a-Guy, a solo originally performed by O’Conner and now being performed by Tim Bendernagel, was the realization that I had seen this work before. This was not déjà vu. I lived in NYC in the 80s, which is where/when I first encountered and became a fan of O’Conner’s work. Realizing I’d seen this piece before felt like an echo, an overlay of my own history projected onto the present[ation]. As transcendent for me as this experience was, it was merely one of an infinite range of possible responses an audience member might have at any fraction of a second while watching a performance. This mutability of audience perception / reception is something O’Conner consciously considers and informs his complex, layered, multidimensional choreography. O’Conner’s approach factors in both the performer’s and the audience’s perceptual experience and takes into account the structural components and philosophical implications of the phenomenon [phenomenology] of live dance: space, time, stage, lighting, sound, silence, costume, performer(s), audience.

Tim Bendernagel in Tere O'Conner's Construct-a-Guy [photo: Maria Baranova]

Construct-a-Guy begins in silence, with a solo male dancer (Bendernagel) dressed in a tank top unitard cut off mid-thigh – a bit like those old timey bathing suits you see in early beach photos, the body and musculature of the performer sculpturally evident. The dancer is clearly working through something (internally and physically), oscillating between fully realized dancerly movements and more casual-seeming pedestrian gestures that signal being-in-the world and attempts at coping with same. Emergent femme-y gestures are tried on and cast off like decorative garments. The piece moves through passages of silence and sound by Diane Martel, snippets that fade in and fade out, build into rhythmic catchy bop and release back into silence. Sometimes the dancer works directly with the music, as if alone in his apartment listening to the radio and just rocking out, only to morph into choreographic abstraction, as if shifting from being grounded in a bodily groove into conscious, cerebral inquiry about movement as an idea. As the work evolved, the title “Construct-a-Guy” began to take on multiple meanings. At times it felt like I was watching the choreographer in the studio working through movement concepts. Other times it seemed like a Mary Shelley-esque Frankensteinian attempt at obtaining a desired ideal male other. Still other times, the performer was the newly constructed guy, the “construction” aspect of Construct-a-Guy becoming a lens through which to witness the work. The continual variations legibly indicated the idea of the choreographer performing (constructing) himself, a performer embodying a kind of Platonic ideal of guy-ness - a desired bespoke male other - only to [shape-]shift into a grammar of asemic abstraction. And somewhere within all these conveyed conditions of being was a doubling, a reverberation of O’Conner, who originally inhabited this piece, a remote invocation of past iterations partnering with Bendernagel, on some level defying the fact that this was is a “solo” and imbuing it with a quality of call and response, a confluence of presences (one literal, one embodied in a liminal space of temporal delay) that coalesced as a hypothetical duet.

The Lace was performed by six dancers (Bendernagel, Liony Garcia, Gabriel Bruno, Eng Gonzalez, Natalie Green, Aaron Loux, and Heather Olson), again moving through passages of silence and sound, in this case created by O’Conner. Like Construct-a-Guy, the work began in silence with a solo male performer, with the other dancers standing, off to the sides, exposed in the visible “wings,” in other words “off-stage” but present. (O’Conner later described that configuration as the performers functioning as audience, underscoring to my mind the paradoxical idea of performer as witness, performer as perceiver. O’Conner’s work hinges on the agentic axis of the performer, the broader social/political/ethical implications of which are only just occurring to me as I write this.) As the piece evolved, the performers, costumed in variations of simple muslin with exposed dressmaking elements, moved through interwoven and intricate patterns via varying groupings (duets, trios, etcetera) invoking literal lace patterns. At times they engaged in subtle acts of interpersonal communication, with much expression and expressiveness through their hands, variously invoking ideas of facture and embodied being (and in this way echoing a similar dichotomy present in Construct-a-Guy). In one notable and intimate moment, two dancers came together toward the front of the stage and, with subtle sensitivity, touched each other’s fingers.

Cast of Tere O'Conner's The Lace [photo: Maria Baranova]

One could certainly read The Lace through the literal lens of “lace” as a material condition. A simple projection of “Xs” lined the two sides of the back wall, echoing the idea of stitched thread. As the work evolved, regardless of how abstract and far-reaching the choreographic variations became (formal patterns, vernacular gestures, curiously inventive flailed arms and flicks of wrist), I found myself continuing to project the material possibility of lace onto whatever I saw, a recurring internal riff that I was witnessing an ever-expanding tableau/treatise on the subject. I was sent time-travelling, cataloging all past experiences I’ve ever had with lace, memories of (where? Museums? Shop windows? Online videos? My grandmother’s apartment? Lingerie? [the potential erotics of lace are duly noted here ((dare we speak of fetish?))]) with vivid flashbacks of close viewing and responding to lace, at times overwhelmed by miniscule geometries and impossible levels of craftsmanship and mathematical complexity. I thought of dandyism, royal attire, ecclesiastical vestments. All the while hearing echoes of O’Conner’s text that he read between the two pieces, which referenced what he called “the closeted mind” as a fundamental underpinning and basis for expression and “liberatory” actions through art. I thought of Oscar Wilde and The Picture of Dorian Gray, which I’ve recently been revisiting through the art practice of Bill Thelen, who generated a body of work titled Hotel Theory as homage to the Wayne Kostenbaum’s book of the same name…I kept flashing back to a postcard I still have somewhere from one of O’Conner’s shows back in the 80s in NYC, which featured him wearing a loose, white, full-sleeved blousy cotton shirt that I am fairly certain had lace elements. The image was kinetic, captured O’Conner in a joyous, ecstatic [meaning away from stasis, in motion] dancerly moment. The real time memory of this image was hallucinatory, active in my mind’s eye as the performers generated new motional imagery: perceptual overlay, double exposure.

If this work had not been called The Lace (or made any reference to lace), it could have led to an entirely different read (and the “Xs” projected on the back wall understood in scores of other ways…X-rated, x marks the spot, x chromosomes, “x” as shorthand for a kiss, as something elided, crossed out, x as the signature of one who does not know how to write her own name, the algebraic “solve for x”…).