Has there recently been an evening of dance like that at San Francisco’s Project Artaud Theater Thursday evening (May 8)? Has there recently been a performance in which illumination and irony so jostled with bone-crushing tedium? I cannot say whether these violently contrasting responses are typical of what one can normally expect from conceptualist dancer-choreographer Miguel Gutierrez, but I can say that the minutes flew by like millennia during the second of the two unbroken hours of the Brooklyn-based artist’s appearance in the ODC-sponsored festival, "For the Record: Dancers Debate the Body Politic."
Gutierrez, who, at one time performed with Joe Goode’s company here, doesn’t so much debate the issue under review as assert in a way that resists argument. He opens the 55-minute solo, Retrospective Exhibitionist (2005), by rushing around naked (save for a baseball cap, hideous streaked wig and sneakers), arranging and connecting his props. They include a mirror, a VHS machine, video camera, TV, microphone, sound box and dumbbells. From there, he explores, in his own fashion, that point in which narcissism slips over into artistry, and he slips with it.
True, there are interludes during which Gutierrez (now, respectably draped) cuts loose with a vigorous and improvised solo that seems to incorporate every style under the sun. But dancing is not what this piece is really about so much as the performer’s perception of himself. Gutierrez shows us a video of his responses during a Q & A session held at Jacob’s Pillow and he recites the answer in unison with his recorded self. He unblinkingly unveils footage of himself cavorting as a youngster, then with a bunch of teenage girls and he basks in his receding hall of mirror images on the TV screen.
All this takes a kind of raw courage. Contrasting your older and doughier self with its youthfully pristine incarnation amounts to a kind of transcendent exhibitionism. Gutierrez fondles himself, kisses his image in the mirror (not nearly as persuasively as Alain Delon did in the movie, Plein Soleil and stripping to his underwear, poses over a lit candle, which is elevated through the deposit of books under the dish (Goode was one of the purveyors of books Thursday), bringing the heat even closer to his genitals. Viewers of a graduate student frame of mind (those for whom "performative" is part of the vocabulary) may interpret this gambit as a profound moment in the history of American postmodernism. Perhaps, this masochistic gesture symbolizes what it means to expose your soul every evening.
At the end, Gutierrez poses in the altogether for a small eternity, then droops. We also are treated to a series of primal screams and chatty interjections. The volume of the looped sound and the pounding rock music, here and elsewhere through the evening, often crosses the pain threshold, and it seems downright irresponsible of ODC series director, Rob Bailis, not to offer earplugs to patrons, or at least warn them of what’s to come. I was one decibel from fleeing the scene.
At least, Retrospective Exhibitionist holds the attention, perhaps because of its unpredictability. But the second work, Difficult Bodies, adds up to conceptualism with a vengeance. Here, while Gutierrez hovers on the sidelines delivering his version of eardrum shattering beat boxing, three women—Anna Azrieli, Michelle Boulé and Abby Crain—saunter on in black spangled dresses. For more than 30 minutes, they posture and swivel in unison, repeating the combinations, slowly dropping to the floor, rolling forward, very gradually stripping down to bras and panties and allowing convulsions to course through their torsos. At the end, they don colored T-shirts, tussle on the floor with Gutierrez and elevate their butts before finishing with a kind of postmodern American Bandstand routine. The pasted-on smiles make us complicit in the irony.
I do realize that Gutierrez is here posing a crucial question about the nature of the artistic persona. Do dancers bring the sum total of their being to their dances or is it possible or responsible to adapt another face and manner? And is one necessarily more real than the other? Length, alas, does not confer profundity. But, more germane, Gutierrez’s works seem to be so rooted in the self that the transferring of these attributes to another person or persons lacks the kind of conviction that might compel the interest.
Throughout the evening, Gutierrez revels in the trappings of postmodernism. They include the almost obligatory dash through the performance space and the calling out for lighting changes. The artifice of live theater is not something that we need be reminded of. That fourth wall was demolished a long time ago.
Miguel Gutierrez & The Powerful People continue through Saturday at 8 p.m. at Project Artaud Theater, 450 Florida St., in San Francisco. For tickets, visit www.odctheater.org or call (415) 863-9834.
