Standing To See Jill Johnson’s ‘The Copier’

Jill Johnson’s “The Copier” makes the audience do some work. And it’s more than the imaginative work that one inevitably does while attending a performance. At Cedar Lake Contemporary Ballet’s wide-open, hangar-like performance space last week, most of the audience stood. There were seats or perches for only a few people. Speaking as someone who once stood through Wagner’s “Siegfried,” Ms. Johnson’s 40-minute work is a piece of cake. But watching it standing has the effect of making us aware of our own muscularity, which becomes to some degree the theatrical subject. Furthermore, our standing was meant to be an extended invitation to contribute our own creative framing of the event — we were instructed to move around at will.Ms. Johnson danced with William Forsythe’s Ballett Frankfurt, and she has staged his work all around the world. By putting our attendance into play, as part of the theatrical event, she links up with an interest of Mr. Forsythe’s: the destruction of classic illusionism in the World War I era and the way these revisions were revived and expanded in the 1960s. In Mr. Forsythe’s “Steptext,” the auditorium lights suddenly go up, and we realize we are on display, although, in a more traditional theatrical context, confined to our seats. Ms. Johnson’s game plan also involves a relaxation of what is traditionally the theatrical periphery — off-limits to the audience — into something of center stage. The dancers exit and enter throughout our midst, stepping off the slightly raised runway-shaped performance arena. Ms. Johnson hasn’t taken this aesthetic to its maximum application, which would have meant the complete absolution of boundaries between performer and spectator. Here the thresholds are still observed, but also compromised at the same time. Frequently, the dancers stride to the periphery of the performance space and stare into our ranks, without making direct eye contact. They seem to be sentinels, as well as performers, surrendering themselves for our inspection. At other times, when they return from the edges back to center stage, they seem to have walked themselves back from an abyss.Ms. Johnson calls “The Copier” an installation, and it had the feel of 1960s performance art or a “happening.” As we filed in, we saw an aperture high on the back wall disgorging paper shreds. Jim French’s batons of light flick on the walls; lighting battens on the ceiling move back and forth, meant to suggest a photocopier. The music by David Poe begins with a twittering, cawing sound track, as the dancers ripple down to the ground, or go through a litany of stretching and yoga positions, hanging-out and preparatory stances. There is the manifest assertion of the performers being “themselves,” flaunting their own dancer identities the way that Mr. Forysthe is so partial to. (As the piece proceeds, we see the way these informal attitudes recur and are absorbed into a more structured movement fabric.) Early on, dimming lights seem to announce the beginning of a more formalized experience, but now the dancers paradoxically lie down on their backs and do nothing for a bit.The decentralized stage picture, the illusion of random visual cacophony, as well as the movement language, owe a debt to Mr. Forsythe, as well as Merce Cunningham. But not excessively. Ms. Johnson manages to assert her own imprint, via clusters, knots, huddles, and handoffs shot through with the unexpectedly decorative and poetic touch of arms arranged in a maypole-streamer fashion. The 15-member ensemble proceeds by way of spirals, undulating waves, and skids to the floor.As “The Copier” goes on, it shapes up increasingly as a study of crowd behavior. The dancers seem to be wandering aimlessly and then suddenly they all march forward, not quite in lockstep, sometimes acknowledging the shape of the performance space by mimicking a fashion-show strut. Midway through “The Copier,” there is suddenly silence, and the dancers seem to be thinking, “What do we do next?”Eventually, they line up single file, facing different ways, and start bumping into each other in a way that resembles falling dominoes. The stage empties, re-populates. There are jazz vocals presented as if through a speaking tube, then a woman dancing alone to the sound of a solitary piano. Soon after that, the dancers are a collection of lone, oblivious individuals, engaged in their own spidery stretches, but then they are dropping to the floor in communal powwows. Cedar Lake’s excellent dancers give everything that they have, immersing themselves in Ms. Johnson’s bottom-heavy, gravity-acquiescent, scribbling calligraphy of the body.

Standing To See Jill Johnson’s ‘The Copier’

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