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Laurie Van Wieren

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"Who Made These Videotapes?", 2nd Draft- August, 2011

lvw-solo
lvw-solo

"Who Made These Videotapes?", 2nd Draft- August, 2011 | Media List


Statement


2nd
draft: Who made these videotapes?
 
Video
and new works in progress by
Laurie Van Wieren
August
23-26
 
Studio
206
Ivy
Building for the Arts
2637 27th Avenue South
Minneapolis, MN 55406
 
Gallery hours- video documentation: August
22-25, 10am
to 3pm


Performance: August 25, 26,
8PM
Dancers: Kristin Van Loon, Sally Rousse, Joanna Furnans, Tom Carlson, Michelle
Kinney

Reviews

Best of 2010-2011: Laurie Van Wieren
by Charles Campbell , Mn Playlist • Sep. 11
Criticism | Innovation

Despite
our brave rhetoric, in which live performance is often misrepresented
as more special than a good film, album, or TV show, too often we sit in
the audience forcing our eyelids up. Eventually, we give in and applaud
the effort involved rather than the integrity of the work. While I like
mindless entertainment as much as the next zombie, I prefer to spend
less time and money on it than live performance tends to require. In
addition to keeping our eyes open, live performance should be both a
renegade act and an investigative art that attempts to reinvent itself
at every moment without relying on the conventions and tropes of the
conformist politico-entertainment industrial complex.

Good work doesn't have to be heavy, intellectual, esoteric, or
experimental – Well, maybe it does have to be experimental if that means
searching for an appropriate means for an interesting thought, but that
does not mean it has to offer instant gratification. It needs to live
in the here and now, with a sense of history. Otherwise it closes up and
dies.

To live is to move. The world we live in requires movement of thought
as a moral imperative. Changing current reality is only made possible
by thinking differently, questioning the status quo. The alternative is
to be sucked into the gaping Sarlacc of acquiescence to the Way Things
Are. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned (with due respect
to Santayana) to stumble blindly against the future.
Like watching a flying stutter
2nd Draft: Who Made These Video Tapes? performed at the end
of August, was the culmination of work Laurie Van Wieren – a local
institution without the Doric columns – initiated last December with Who Made These Video Tapes?
Set against displays of excerpts from her previous 20+ years of work
in the local performance community, Ms Van Wieren's work is at first
glance a celebratory retrospective. In addition to re-stagings of
earlier works, there were videos, photographs, programs, scores, objects
and costumes on display throughout the Ivy Building's Studio 206 the
week of the performance.

But 2nd Draft, in conjunction with December's work, was more
than just an entertaining and educational performance-exhibition. It
was a rigorous, forward-looking creation that addressed fundamental
questions of what it means to be alive, and did so in a way that was
witty, engaging, and touching – but, more importantly, it experimented
with form and practice in order to open up these explorations
specifically for those in the audience in the here and now.

A key element of both the December and August work is Ms Van Wieren's Solo.
This piece was constructed in December from bits and pieces of her own
history. Ms Van Wieren told me she thinks in bits and pieces. "Memory is
like that," she says. "I put things together in pieces. This is put
together like a painting. Bits and pieces of my past work."

What we saw in performance was a little like watching a flying
stutter. She entered from the side with her left arm held in a curve in
front of her. She found a place and in a breath, threw her arms in the
air and held a pose as if climbing up a wall. Then, she walked like a
raccoon on its hind legs. A moment later and she is kicking out behind
her, sending her arms in front of her like pistons and scooting
backwards across the room. But then she turned her head abruptly, as if
checking who was watching – or who had pushed her or called her name.
See her face
A problem with this familiar mode of describing movement is that it
leaves out her face. It is in part the face that activates these moments
of movement into flying lines of life and keeps the movement from
becoming pure abstraction. Each of her movements comes from an image or
moment of her history—from a past piece, past training, a relative's
gesture, a photograph. Each of these moments of movement have the
fullness of character and narrative – figuration – but without the
story, emotional arc, or formal development that would lend them
familiar shape. Constructed into a series of movements, they form a
machine, a physical means of thinking through the past. But they occur
in the performer's conscious sense of present-tense existence – being
with us now in this specific room. The cascading fragments of images in
this collection of movements set two temporalities against each other:
her personal past and our shared present. In the spaces between each
movement – in the moments before and after – the face adds a third term
to the equation: an individual life being lived as we watch, and this
concatenation suggests entirely other forms of knowledge – neither
entirely abstract nor entirely concrete.

She calls this dance, so I call this dance. But there is something
going on here that escapes the confines of language and discipline. I
could call it by a different name, but names are beside the point here.
The work flutters like a fevered mind between accepted conventions of
disciplines and forms until the excited blur of its identity becomes its
own reward.

Given the complexity of this solo performance, it would be sufficient
grist for my little mental mill to grind away at it for some time. And
in December's Who Made These Video Tapes? the solo stood on its own next to the sparkling and pointed piece, 5 Dancers and A DJ.
But this August, Ms Van Wieren further intensified the experience by
teaching the solo performance to three very different dancers with whom
she had never worked: Sally Rousse, Kristin Van Loon, and Joanna
Furnans. In its varied iterations, the solo work developed almost into a
fugue as each of these performers rode the same choreographic
mechanisms of open structure, controlled form, and individual
idiosyncratic movement.

Rather than pass on a codified series of her own movements or
choreograph idiosyncratic movements developed by her dancers, or provide
us with a run of open improvisations, Ms Van Wieren managed to create
an open framework of images in which the individual performer's
characteristic idiosyncrasies stood out against the characteristic
idiosyncrasies of Ms Van Wieren's body and history.
The body is an archive.
The body is an archive. A place where our own lives and the lives of
others leave their marks: our habits are learned, inherited, or marked
by the scars of our passage through life. These records of what has gone
before guide much of where we are headed. Because the world does not
make sense – or rather, it only makes the sense we make of it – the
choices Ms Van Wieren made in creating this piece are particularly
poignant. She does not allow us the comfort of either a familiar
narrative structure or of a repeatable abstract design. She does not
tell us what to think or to imagine, but offers us freedom.

When in Ms Van Wieren's piece her body performs its archive we see
both the idiosyncratic presence that is the individual before us as well
as reflections, or remanences, of her past made present. When the other
dancers perform the same work, we don't see their archives – their
pasts are not on display. Nor do we see mere interpretations of Ms Van
Wieren's images. We see the absence of Ms Van Wieren. In this absence,
the intimate presence of the other performers is revealed, inhabiting
the here and now.

Because of the choreographic machinery, each performer's specific
idiosyncrasies are exposed, naked, as they arise in each moment. The
work reinvents itself with each movement, riding the moment of
performance on the structure of both Ms. Van Wieren's past and each
performer's individual present. Against the temporal richness of Ms Van
Wieren's performance, these naked idiosyncrasies allow us to recognize
what it means to be here now, and provoke the movement of thought:

What is this stuff we have lived through that has disappeared?

What is it to have this past?

What is this?

Where are we now?

This place. . . .

This thing, this…