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KOOSIL-JA/DANCEKUMIKO "BLOCKS OF CONTINUALITY/BODY, IMAGE AND ALGORITHM"
By Laura Molzahn:
If you think the title is daunting, you should see the 75-minute work. Choreographer-director Koosil-ja has created an experience that challenges the ears, the eyes, the mind, and the heart. Her philosophical discussion of the project makes it no clearer; she says, for example, that she wants to "perceive body and movement algorithmically. I want to know about the body from a molecular level...and wash off all politics and stigma."
Problem is, a lot else gets washed off too. There's no doubting the seriousness and discipline of "Blocks of Continuality/Body, Image and Algorithm," running through Saturday, February 6, at the Dance Center of Columbia College. But Koosil-ja's whole enterprise---which involves the dancer "entering another body" through technological means so that she can become "free and pure" --- seems misguided. For me reality lies in the mess, in the individual, in the here and now, not in "underlying principles" or abstractions.
Here's what happens in a nutshell: In the first three-quarters of the piece, three dancers enact a series of solos, duets, and trios while watching banks of screens displaying still and moving images of the human body. These change regularly. Using a process Koosil-ja calls "live processing," the dancers copy and integrate the motions they see on the screens.
Meanwhile the four banks, one on each edge of the performing area, create a private domain for the performers, and the audience is outside, watching: voyeurs. Clearly Koosil-ja is evoking the overload of imagery and information that digital media enable --- "Blocks of Continuality" is like a six-ring circus. Straining to see the screen images, small and distant, I tried to connect them with the live dancers, then thought: why? But looking only at the dancers made me curious about their sources, and my eyes wandered back to the screens. It's the same restless search enacted every day as people struggle to wring every last bit of information from the Internet.
Koosil-ja's abstracting approach produces a denatured body language garnered from anonymous, culturally diverse sources presented in short visual bursts without syntax. Yet at its best it can evoke something, have some human character through Koosil-ja's direction or from the performances of mercurial dancers Melissa Guerrero, Ava Heller, and Elise Knudson. Despite Koosil-ja's aim to create "a new networked body made of real and virtual," for me they were always distinct. Dancers are a cooperative bunch, and watching them watch their screens, I found their intense concentration on the deluge of images intensely human and moving.
Most affecting is the final section of the first part. In a danced diminuendo, a soloist slowly reduces the scope of her movements until all we can see are tiny inflections of the body: slight shifts in weight, a wrist rotated, flicking eyes. She begins to mutter words keyed to her motions: "nod," "palm," "elbow," "move to the side," "hold the center." Her minimalism, perhaps the pared-down effect of mental exhaustion, sharply contrasts with the rapidly shifting excesses of the images onscreen. The music is quiet, a song without words by Koosil-ja and Geoff Gersh that blends with the dancer's muttering, creating a sense of peace and intimacy.
By contrast much of the rest of the score, by Koosil-ja and Geoff Matters, is at best electronic wallpaper and at worst, aural torture. Then, for the piece's final 15 or 20 minutes, the music is --- well, both amazing and monotonous. Gersh is hooked up to a device, designed and engineered by Stephan Moore, that uses brain waves to activate a sound installation: meditating in a chair downstage, Gersh produces alpha waves that translate into a two-note percussive phrase like a heartbeat at irregular intervals, interrupting the machine's loud buzzing.
The whole fleet of tech wizards involved in "Blocks of Continuality" is especially crucial to the second and final part. Each dancer is outfitted with sensors that use Wii technology to translate live movement to digital animations projected on large screens, one for each dancer. This finale is initially impressive, the images chilling in the nightmarish stories they seem to tell and in their eerie video-game movement, both familiarly human and skin-crawlingly alien. But the imagery, going on too long and evolving with excruciating slowness, comes to seem mere gimmickry while the live dancers, still moving to their video screens in the dark onstage, almost disappear. I hated to see them go.
By the end, Koosil-ja has literally made her dancers the "open conduit" for information she aims to achieve: they're processing human movement from the small screens and passing it on, through the sensors, to the big screens and the animated human beings. Sure, it's cool. But all the philosophizing in the world can't make me see a point beyond that.
