Bart Beaty Reviews Art Spiegelman Collaboration With Dance Troupe Pilobolus
By Bart Beaty
It's said that you can't dance about architecture, which raises the question of whether you can dance about comics. Or, more accurately, dance as comics.
The CIBDI in Angouleme offered a few comics-themed dances this year, and both Vincent Fortemps and Thierry van Hasselt have done comics in conjunction with choreographers in recent years. Still, the combination remains so rare that I hopped on a plane to New York when I learned that Art Spiegelman was working with the dance troupe Pilobolus on a new piece titled "Hapless Hooligan In 'Still Moving'." I saw the show Monday night.
The dance was one of the five performed that night, and it probably ran somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 minutes. The work is broken into a series of chapters and it tells a very slight story: boy meets girl, boy loses girl to a thug (who might also be the devil), thug kills girl, hero joins girl in death.
Formally the piece is divided into parts that take place behind a screen, parts that take place in front of it and parts that are a hybrid of the two.
The dance begins behind the screen with the shadows of the dancers projected upon it. This has several storytelling advantages. First, it allows the integration of animation -- as when Hapless is tormented by a flying, lightning-firing eyeball, and speech and thought balloons that recall some of the devices common to Spiegelman's work. Second, it allows multiple performers to convincingly play the same role in consecutive panels that are projected onto the screen. This is used to great effect on several occasions in which the performers dance in tandem in front of and behind the screen so that the audience sees both the characters and their 'shadows'. This was timed so nicely that the first time it happened I was briefly fooled into thinking I was see actual shadows being cast.
One other effect that was nicely done was the play with scale. By moving closer to the light source the dancers altered their size relative to each other.
That said, there were things that didn't work as well. The design of the panels and comics storytelling placed limits on the movement of the dancers that didn't seem productive and which eliminated many of the impressive tour de force acrobatics on display in the other works. In the performance that I saw it was clear that the house was composed of a dance crowd there to see a Pilobolus show not a comics crowd there to see a Spiegelman production and "Hapless Hooligan" didn't seem to give them the type of dance they were looking for. Several of the post-intermission pieces got much more enthusiastic receptions.
I left thinking that it was an interesting attempt to hybridize to art forms that are almost never thought of in conjunction. In many ways it was quintessentially Spiegelman: jazz-infused, irreverent, self-aware and concerned with interrogating the limits of form. I'm glad that I saw it.
