Saturday was the final night of Fringe, the last show I went
to, and, damn, am I glad I did. “Transient Being,” choreographed by Eran David P. Hanlon in collaboration with performing
artist AlainaOlivieri and
visual artist Joseph Tarantelli moved me like nothing
else I’ve seen at the festival. Olivieri’s arresting movements
reflected the deconstruction and rebirth theme of Tarantelli’s
projected video,” FALL WINTER SPRING,” a documentary that shows the making of
the painting by the same name.

The studio space of Gallery r provided an intimate setting
for this hard-hitting emotional piece. The audience (including many dancers) waited
perched on wooden blocks clustered around a drop cloth of sorts that held big
puddles of paint — red, white and blue. The audience quieted as Tarantelli suspended an orange sponge above the stage set;
next, he lifted up a bowl of yellow paint, soaking the sponge, which began
dripping and coloring the large wooden block placed below it. Then, hushed
silence except for the splot of the drips splashing
down rapidly before dwindling to a hesitant drip…drop, drip…drop, drip….

Finally, Olivieri entered,
completely transformed: face whitened, teeth blackened, hair twisted and matted
with clay slip and mud, and body covered in white-gray paint with splotches of
color and bands of red around her arms and waist. What immediate impact! She
looked creepy. Otherworldly. I thought of Gollum from “The
Hobbit.” And zombies.And Hiroshima.

As she edged tentatively around the walls of the gallery,
head and shoulders hunched, arms stiff at her sides, and eyes downcast, people
turned their heads and then bodies to follow her progress, as one might at the
sighting of a wild animal. She crept, she inched, she froze and the audience
remained transfixed. Dance is not all about whirlwind movement, speed and
height. It is also about slowness in moving through space and stillness in that
space one occupies.

Olivieri circled the room until
she reached the screen where Tarantelli’s video was
playing, showing pleasing, fast-flowing imagery capturing the process of
painting. Rich colors were slapped onto canvas and brushed together in sped-up
time. Olivieri drew back in alarm before cautiously
beginning to engage with the images, extending an arm into a stream of colored
light, then a leg, veering from frightened to exploratory. Then she turned away
from the video and began interacting with the actual puddles of paint on the
floor. Like a very young child in discovery mode, she darted a finger in and
out of the paint as if it could be dangerous. Emboldened, she then smeared
paint along her whole arm. Her breathing became audible here, as if she were
becoming more alive, more human. For me, it seemed a metaphor for an awakening
through art.

I found Hanlon’s choreography most powerful during the midsection
of the piece. On screen, the paint was being scraped away; we watched the hand
wielding a flat-edged painting knife to scrub the canvas clean. White.Winter. The title of the
video was not displayed until the end of the performance, however, so I did not
make these seasonal connections until after the show was over. I would have
liked to have had the fall, winter, spring theme in my
mind as I watched. 

Meanwhile, the rasp of the scraping suffused through the
hush of the studio occupied by the observers. Olivieri’s
movements here mirrored both the actual and thematic content of the video. With
her face contorted in anguish — wide-mouthed grimaces, shifting jaw, and silent
prolonged screams — she began the process of stripping herself clean, just as
winter lays bare the earth before the renewal of spring. I (indeed, all the
audience) watched, mesmerized, as she began, in obvious agony, to literally
peel layers of herself off, oh so slowly. I definitely felt the influence of butoh dance here. The slow, protracted
movements.The display of humanity’s dark and
vulnerable side.

“One of the most difficult challenges in dance is
stillness,” Olivieri told me post-performance. “I
wondered if people would still be engaged.”

Believe me, they were.

This article appears in Sep 25 – Oct 1, 2013.