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Love me, love my table
Dorner's "above under inbetween' at Live Arts Festival
Jonathan M. Stein
A year ago the Austrian choreographer Willi Dorner scored a big Fringe Festival success with Bodies in Urban Spaces, a Pied Piper experience that beckoned the audience to follow Dorner's athletic dancers as they raced through Center City streets, stopping intermittently amid buildings and sidewalks to establish short-lived sculptural tableaux with their massed bodies. This year, Dorner brought his explorations of bodies in space indoors to the ICE BOX, where he presented a slyly humorous work that suggested that we relate more closely to the objects in our domestic lives than we think.
Using a versatile cast of Austrian dancers (and Philadelphia's stand-out Megan Bridge, who performed as if she were a veteran of this company), Dorner slowly built movement in active conjunction with ladders, chairs, tables, closets and other mundane utilitarian objects. As the piece slowly traversed across the large space from left to right, dancers individually and then in groups explored the surfaces around these objects.
At first the bodies were stacked or jig-sawed around them; but then subtle, deliberate arcs of movement, embracing the forces of gravity and momentum, impacted upon the objects and their space, rendering this a dance with familiar objects whose presence we could no longer ignore or take for granted. The results were often quite funny and full of surprises for a willing audience.
As a conceptual artist and choreographer, Dorner extends into movement the sculptural interests of Rachel Whitread, the British artist (and first woman to win the Turner Prize there). Since the early '90s, Whitread has created plaster casts of "negative" spaces— the spaces that the objects don't occupy, such as her Ghost, the 1990 plaster cast of the inside room of a Victorian house.
Dorner, like Whitread, "creates beauty from domestic nothingness," as one Whitread observer remarked. But unlike Whitread, through the unique art form of choreography he can also extend the meanings of how we relate to and use our domestic environment, and how it might use us in return.
Dorner's tour de force ending raised echoes of the Swiss conceptual/installation artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who in 1987 created a film (The Way Things Go) to document the realization of a Rube Goldberg-type drawing into three dimensions as objects fell or moved in continuous succession, igniting fires or explosions that in turn set in motion other objects or fluids in a mad series of non-sequitur connectedness. After Dorner's buildup of bodies interacting with his varying objects, the movement returned from right to left, in a hilarious and physically challenging series of falling and cascading bodies, with falling or sliding objects triggering a madcap series of events.
Dorner's dancers showed us the potential for witty and surprising reactions emanating from the weight and momentum of bodies, which earlier in the performance had been expressed primarily by spatial and volumetric qualities. When a brilliant artist offers both conceptual originality with smart humor and laughs, you can't ask for more.
Using a versatile cast of Austrian dancers (and Philadelphia's stand-out Megan Bridge, who performed as if she were a veteran of this company), Dorner slowly built movement in active conjunction with ladders, chairs, tables, closets and other mundane utilitarian objects. As the piece slowly traversed across the large space from left to right, dancers individually and then in groups explored the surfaces around these objects.
At first the bodies were stacked or jig-sawed around them; but then subtle, deliberate arcs of movement, embracing the forces of gravity and momentum, impacted upon the objects and their space, rendering this a dance with familiar objects whose presence we could no longer ignore or take for granted. The results were often quite funny and full of surprises for a willing audience.
As a conceptual artist and choreographer, Dorner extends into movement the sculptural interests of Rachel Whitread, the British artist (and first woman to win the Turner Prize there). Since the early '90s, Whitread has created plaster casts of "negative" spaces— the spaces that the objects don't occupy, such as her Ghost, the 1990 plaster cast of the inside room of a Victorian house.
Dorner, like Whitread, "creates beauty from domestic nothingness," as one Whitread observer remarked. But unlike Whitread, through the unique art form of choreography he can also extend the meanings of how we relate to and use our domestic environment, and how it might use us in return.
Dorner's tour de force ending raised echoes of the Swiss conceptual/installation artists Peter Fischli and David Weiss, who in 1987 created a film (The Way Things Go) to document the realization of a Rube Goldberg-type drawing into three dimensions as objects fell or moved in continuous succession, igniting fires or explosions that in turn set in motion other objects or fluids in a mad series of non-sequitur connectedness. After Dorner's buildup of bodies interacting with his varying objects, the movement returned from right to left, in a hilarious and physically challenging series of falling and cascading bodies, with falling or sliding objects triggering a madcap series of events.
Dorner's dancers showed us the potential for witty and surprising reactions emanating from the weight and momentum of bodies, which earlier in the performance had been expressed primarily by spatial and volumetric qualities. When a brilliant artist offers both conceptual originality with smart humor and laughs, you can't ask for more.
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