furthering the art of dance film
May/June 2011
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Body
of Water: installation review
Posted
on June 24, 2000
by dancefilmsassociation
Body of Water: Video
installation and live performance by Dawn Kramer and Stephen Buck at Pozen
Center and Godine Gallery, Massachusetts College of Art and Design, Boston, MA,
June 3-4, 2011
Review by Debra Cash
A dappled chameleon lingers
among granite boulders. A water lilyÕs pale face brightens a stream of dark
water secreted within a hidden cleft. A ripple of fabric seems to unfurl and
crash against the face of a rock wall above white surf. Glimpses of
color, of light; all of these moments are revealed to be a dancerÕs body
flashing impermanently within a natural world that can, and will, endure with
or without her.
Boston intermedia artist Dawn
Kramer and her partner Stephen Buck created a video-amplified installation for
two evenings at the Massachusetts College of Art and Design in early June.
Kramer is a professor in the Studio for Interrelated Media at MassArt, and
since the 1980s has been part of a team that periodically has taught
ÒPerformance in Videospace.Ó In a program that designated half of its proceeds
for Japanese disaster relief, Body of Water dealt less
with the tsunami, flooding and climate change of recent years than with the
ways humans take the availability and purity of water for granted at our own
eventual peril.
In the darkened Godine Family
gallery, BuckÕs videos, executed with Mark
ConiglioÕs Isadora software, established the mood of natureÕs
eternal cycles with a full, coral-tinged ÒMoonÓ rising and setting unhurriedly
through a sky far from the lights of habitation. Next, a tree at the Haystack
Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, Maine fractured and churned
kaleidoscopically, as glimpses of the dancerÕs arms and fingers joined the
treeÕs branches in the webbing of a natural mandala.
Eventually Kramer welcomed her
guests into the main auditorium where small-scale Òvideo haikuÓ played on each
of four walls like independent, cardinal references. Empty glass bottles
– just waiting for messages! – bobbed from her earrings; her
remarkable, just-this-side-of-glamour fishscale dress, executed by Sara Marhamo
of the Industrial Stitchers Guild, was composed of crushed plastic bottles.
We were invited to pull slips
of paper from a jar. Inside were a series of water-themed haiku that could
certainly do double duty as psychologically insightful fortunes. I got:
ÒDew evaporates/And all our world is dew/So dear, so fresh, so fleeting
(Issa).Ó
Created on the Maine coast, in
the grove of a Massachusetts yoga center called Westwoods, on the wind-scoured
cliffs of Nervi, Italy (where Kramer and Buck spent time developing material at
the nearby Bogliasco Foundation) and in three exquisite temple gardens in
Kyoto, Kramer and BuckÕs quiet, single-channel videos recalled Anna HalprinÕs
aesthetic terrain. These were primarily images made in solitude, recorded by an
ÒinvisibleÓ observer for an audience that might be physically remote or
emotionally estranged from the natural setting, and touched but never
completely distorted by an edge of surrealism. Kramer has said she was interested
in playing with scale in these vignettes, but that wasnÕt conveyed by the Mass
Art installation. Instead, one had a keener sense of the cameraÕs closeness or
distance from the dancerÕs body than of the vastness or detail of the natural
setting.
Kramer then took to the roomÕs
proscenium for a brief solo performance. Sometimes humorous, sometimes merely
elaborately colored by the moving projections, she turned upside down like a
starfish, bobbed along as if pummeled by brilliant moving droplets from a spewing
fountain, and was dissolved in the streams pouring ceaselessly from a row of
identical faucets. KramerÕs dancing has always been an idiosyncratic mix of
fussy gesture and linear alignment – she often seems to be thwarted,
grasping at something just beyond her reach. Here, the expansiveness of the
environment made by the video imagery – different forms of water, closely
observed rocks, and finally, the vision of a parched desert — reinforced
the sense of her presence in a natural world that could absorb and vanquish
her.
Debra Cash, a longtime
Boston-based dance critic, presents audience engagement talks throughout New
England and is Scholar-in-Residence at the Bates Dance Festival.