CrossCurrents

Blinking (2010)

No wonder Jamie Jewett felt a sense of déjà vu when he came to work on his friend’s house here in Pittsburgh (Aaron Henderson, assistant professor at the Studio Arts Department at the University of Pittsburgh). Currently working out of Providence, the artistic director of Lostwax talked about the faded mill sites in the Rhode Island capitol.

But more than that, he is an unabashed fan of Gene Kelly and couldn’t wait to visit his hometown and begin a week’s residency at the Kelly-Strayhorn Theater in East Liberty, which opened a whole new interactive summer series built around works-in-progress.

His company, the 10-year old Lostwax, is part of a burgeoning dance scene in the New England state. Lostwax, you say? Just for the record, the title comes from a very ancient casting process. Among the steps to making something like a metal sculpture are model-making, moldmaking and burnout, where a wax copy is heated, then melts and runs out…and is lost.

That idea can also be seen in juniper berries, which can be toxic when eaten in large amounts. But they can also be distilled and used to flavor gin, still retaining the essence of the berry. And it can be seen in his latest project, Particular, which gets its inspiration from the group behavior of a flock of starlings or a school of fish, or even rain.

“There are a lot of things that we view as a collective,” he begins. “But they are made of specifics that we can also think of as unique and particular and beautiful. I’m interested in that dialogue.”

The dialogue takes place on stage, forming a new brand of communication between the technology, the music and the dance…and the humans who are creating it, in this case Jamie as choreographer and artistic director of Lostwax, and R. Luke Dubois, composer and currently director of the Brooklyn Experimental Media Center at the Polytechnic Institute of New York University.

The music came from Luke’s kitchen, sort of found objects of everyday life, but remixed in different ways on his laptop. The dance came from Jaime’s movement ideas. They are both also media artists, so the “media happens in the space somewhere between us.”

It relies on an advanced computer animation that was famously used to create the bats in Tim Burton’s 1989 flick, Batman. Called Boids Algorithm, it is a mathematical equation that describes the individual’s behavior in a flock.

But Particular relies on the synthesis of it all.

Jaime asserts that synthesis is nothing new in dance. After all, Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes had the likes of Stravinsky and Picasso folded into the artistic mix. Merce Cunningham used composer John Cage and assorted visual artists. “Dance has always used technology as soon as it is available,” he says, although the participating artists worked independently before assembling the final product.

But his maxim is “no technology without need.” And unlike previous companies, he is interested in the antithesis, where different parts of the work are developed in dialogue with each other.

That’s why the week-long residency at KST was so important to Jaime. “It gives us a time to be in one place, where we can set up our gear and leave it so we can focus on the creative act,” he says.

Actually it turned out that there were two works-in-progress. They showed the first cut of Melt, a video transfer of a former Lostwax piece. Since dance is so fleeting, this was a way of preserving it in another form.

It began with the nifty image of a retro refrigerator and a cascade of ice cubes inside. Slippery blocks of ice contrasted with the crusty mill setting. The movement filled in the spaces, then moved outside and inside a river. As yet, the film was somewhat jumpy, both in the camera work and the various angles and could benefit from smoother transition. But there was very good news that KST had purchased a huge scrim that gave the film the clarity it deserved.

Lostwax must have worked fast on Particular, which had three segments to present. The first had a lacy series of circles repeatedly passing like a Xerox machine, although the choreography didn’t establish itself in the way it should.

However, the piece seemed to escalate from there and the growth was satisfying. In the second segment, there was a flickering border along the bottom of the scrim, where shadows of the dancers were sometimes revealed in real time. And the choreography seemed to balance that.

Then it escalated to the idea of the flock in the most successful of the segments, where both individual and group behavior was visible in a sweep of poetry. On the scrim where abstractions of birds, while the stage the stage was occupied with unfolding movement patterns. Similar, but independent.

There were so many layers to observe here. I liked the idea that the various elements, dance, music and video, carried a real relationship, unlike other multi-media productions where they might interfere with the viewer’s concentration. And within each genre, you could observe subsets of the original idea — flock versus individual. It all seemed to harmonize…

KST executive director janera solomon indicated that this might be the start of a new relationship. This could be one very cool team to watch.