Review Rundown: Of Histories and Historical Epochs

This week it’s one of those “hey, this is what happened” reports. But don’t get too bummed, as there’s every chance we will see some of this work again as Walking Cinema has been eyeing a remount for The Fillmore Eclipse since its first set of dates sold out, and installation art pieces like Breathe with Me have a habit of getting remounted when the stars align.

So use this week’s edition as a waypoint and keep your eyes peeled for these works returning and the creators mounting something new.

Last week’s edition has even more recent NYC immersive work.

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Breathe with Me — Annabelle Schneider @ Cooper Hewitt
Free; NYC; Run Concluded

A showcase of Swiss design, Breath with Me is an immersive installation by artist Annabelle Schneider in partnership with the Consulate General of Switzerland in New York.

Housed at the WSA in NYC in FIDI (is that enough acronyms for one sentence?), the piece consists of a fabric, cave-like environment created out of a shimmering silver textile that pulses around guests to a custom soundscape by Luc Oggier.

After taking off their shoes, guests enter the soft-floored tunnel, littered with cushions and blankets, and take a seat. As the installation’s title suggests, guests are invited to breathe deeply with the space itself: The walls and ceilings rise and fall, deflating and reinflating like lungs all around you. It’s not entirely unlike being in a slowly collapsing bounce house. In a good way.

Right when it seems the surrounding space may deflate too low, it slowly fills up again. There’s something comforting about the pattern. The movement is methodical and meditative, an imaginative re-exploration of what a living environment could look like, one that supports rest and wellness by example.

Nesting amongst soft furniture and softer pillows, I felt like I was in some sort of alien space lounge inside of a giant, breathing worm. Again, in a good way.

Of her installation, designer Schneider said, “I believe that holistic spatial experiences for wellbeing can be only achieved through a conscious choreography of multi sensory layers. … Lying down on the soft floor and observing the breathing fabrics changing scale and volume (expansion and shrinking) within the breathing cocoon is a very unique and soothing / calming experience.”

Surrounding the main space is an impressive collection of lounge pieces — everything from curtains to cushions to modular office furniture to turf — by other Swiss-designers. Unsurprisingly, some of whom had collaborated with Pipilotti Rist (whose galleries at Hauser & Wirth and Luhrig Augustine’s I covered for NoPro this past spring).

To zoom out (way too far than what’s appropriate for a New York gallery review — but bear with me), the anthropocene is quite an interesting moment in evolutionary history. We are now technologically enabled to drastically alter the environments in which we grow and consequently evolve. Stated more directly: we design to what we will adapt. What long-term effects these major technological interventions will have on our species is yet to be discovered

But as we continue to march into this brave, new world, intentionally designing positive, wellness- (and environmentally) minded spaces is going to be of the utmost importance, something Scheider, who crafts spaces “reconnecting body and soul,” is well-equipped to tackle.

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— Alec Zbornak, NYC Correspondent

Convergent Waves: NYC — Lenora Lee Dance & South Street Seaport
Free; New York City; Run concluded

New York is a city built out of the water, a city of islands and harbors, of immigrants arriving via ship. With Convergent Waves: NYC, Lenora Lee Dance and South Street Seaport explore the time when Manhattan’s shores were forests of masts.

Convergent Waves: NYC is a site-specific immersive dance production aboard the 1885 ship Wavertree. Too often, stories about ships and the sea are about the ships themselves: the machines and their construction. Lenora Lee Dance and South Street Seaport wisely make Wavertree the background, instead surfacing the stories of the people.

The stories the show tells are not homogenous in ethnicity, gender, or reasons for being at sea: Chan Ga Yun has joined the ship disguised as a man. Carpenter Woods seeks opportunities not available elsewhere to Black men. Captain Preto’s wife and daughters join him and this maritime community. It was wonderful to see maritime stories that highlight the diversity of the 19th century maritime world.

Convergent Waves makes the most of Wavertree’s expansive spaces. Dancers travel all over the ship, ranging moment to moment between the wide-open weather deck and the cramped crew quarters. Especially effective was a short scene at the bottom of the cargo hold. Shafts of daylight dramatically lit the dancers as video projections added texture to the architecture.

The dancers did not speak during Convergent Waves, in the vein of many immersive dance pieces. Occasionally the soundtrack added a voiceover from one of the characters, and this was a welcome addition. During one scene in the crew quarters, a sailor made eye contact and handed me a letter, a touching musing on running away and the emotions of being at sea. Less effective was seeing a few characters on the weather deck handing these notes out down the line like pamphlets at the train station.

Convergent Waves had very few hiccups. Wavertree’s nature as an outdoor attraction in Lower Manhattan provides a challenging audio environment, and it was hard to hear. I would also love to see a longer-form version with more time to develop characters and more time to explore all the stories.

All in all, Convergent Waves was a thought-provoking and beautiful reflection on the people who built New York City, and as I left I heard audience members excitedly discussing the characters and life at sea. It’s hard to imagine a greater success of historical and social interpretation.

— Penelope Ray, NYC Correspondent

The Fillmore Eclipse — Walking Cinema
$50, San Francisco, Run Concluded

Walking Cinema has made a name for itself in San Francisco for site-specific historic audio and augmented reality tours, and with Fillmore Eclipse, it has taken the next step into a full theatrical production.

The company’s excellent Museum of the Hidden City tour guided visitors through SF’s Fillmore district, walking across the Harlem of the West, through the long since redeveloped “New City.” The Fillmore Eclipse takes visitors inside one of the lost Bebob jazz clubs of this era, modeled after Bob City, whose real-life building still stands less than a block away from the venue. Visitors are invited to The Eclipse’s final night, as the club and the neighborhood around it falls victim to “urban renewal.”

The show’s small but diverse cast highlights many communities affected by the city’s embarrassing history of displacement, in the name of renewal. The performances feel lived-in and real, and the subject matter is clearly personal (many of the performers can trace their family tree directly to this neighborhood and this community). The tension between the communities, particularly black and Japanese populations, is also highlighted, alongside the struggle to sign up for the city’s Certificate of Preference program, and those that were left behind by that program (unhoused members of the community, who nonetheless called it home, and Japanese-Americans still recovering from internment, for example). The dichotomy between celebration for what this place represented and mourning its loss is front and center — the upbeat music contrasted with the sense of loss conveyed by the performers, culminating wordlessly in a beautiful vocal and flute duet.

Small quibbles — the show felt a bit short, and some conflicts felt unresolved. But perhaps that’s not a quibble as much as the intended effect, as history is never as tidily wrapped up as we’d like. And that uneasy, almost disquieted feeling followed me home and lingered much longer than I expected. What Walking Cinema has proven time and again is that they’re unrivaled at unearthing and bringing to life the not-so-distant history of this place. Stepping out of the Eclipse onto the streets these characters once walked, the city felt a bit less hidden, yet again.

— Brian Resler, SF Curator

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