Sunday, May 10, 2009

How much is that artist in the window?

Westminster College entered the world of performance art this weekend with unravel, REVEALED. This live performance spanned 24 hours. Yes I said 24 hours. It started Friday night at 9:30 p.m. and ended Saturday night at 9:30 p.m. I wasn’t ready to invest 24 hours for a college performance art project but I did try and stop by numerous times during the performance to see what was going on.

The project took water ecosystems as its theme re-creating the birth and gradual death of a natural environment and its inhabitants. The work took place outside on 1700 South just west of 1300 West. For the most part, I found the work tedious. The choreography felt improvised but I suppose it would be hard to create 24 hours of dance without asking the dancers to improvise much of it.


My favorite moment came during a portion of the work entitled topographical contours distort (butoh). It involved a near-naked man rising from an old bathtub and dancing about the walls and landscaping. The traffic on 1700 South slowed to barely a crawl. I’m sure there were a lot of confused drivers wondering what was going on.


Much of this work was just boring. In fact there were many times that if I hadn’t known something was going on, I would have thought that it was just people cleaning the windows. But I applaud the artists (choreographer Corrine Cappelletti and visual artists Jim Frazer and Suzanne Simpson masterminded the project) for attempting such an ambitious idea.

1 comment:

Kara said...

That guy in the bathtub missed a spot. He's got a little something on his face.