CrossCurrents

It seems that audiences are getting comfortable with The Pillow Project’s conceptual evenings of multi-media art. Running from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., people come and go at will, converse lightly during the course of a performance, even get a “live” chair massage.

It has long been artistic director Pearlann Porter’s vision (with much help from her small army of artists). But this time, at the second installment of Second Saturdays, things went on without her. Porter had a family wedding to attend and left her resources in the capable hands of Gia Cacalano.

Porter did show up during the course of the evening, glowing in her broomstick skirt, finger-wave hairdo and parasol, along with dapper -looking hubbie, Derek Stoltz. What she found was not only multi-disciplinary, but multi-level.

Visitors were greeted with an outdoors, semi-Asian projection on the wall of Construction Junction. Inside the entrance  there was guitarist/banjoist David Shelow, improvisation to his engaging music led by Nicole Czapinski and “live” portrait sketching by Cara Lynn Kleid and Stewart Williams. Called Cafe Experiment, it had apparently been in the works for some time. It offered some respite from the heat and an alternative performance space with a coffee and separate snack bar.

But The Space Upstairs, with its wide open Space(s) and atmospheric urban lighting, was turned over to curator and choreographer Cacalano, who, for a first-time effort, neatly arranged her improvisational efforts, along with those of Allie Greene and Michael Walsh, into a remarkably seamless evening of movement and music.

Bear in mind that The Pillow Project unveils a large amount of exploratory art at once. So there has to be some give and take when it comes to precision. Cacalano’s aesthetic similarly involved a great deal of improvisation and when there choreographic transitions, the dancers were slightly out of sync.

But then, the creative impulse that propelled this program was all there over a long period of time. There was no formal “meet-the-artists” session. Viewers could converse with “live” painter Karen Seapker, who was demonstrating her process throughout the four hours, or they could simply saddle up to The Swank Easy Bar and talk with whomever wasn’t dancing.

My evening began at 8 p.m., with an improvisational trio steered by Cacalano. It began with a horizontal sensibility — simple linear walking patterns that went back and forth, back and forth. Gradually the dancers began to fall out of line, piercing a perpendicular wall. Then they literally went to the wall, where five movable screens periodically blocked the view, like a teasing game of hide-and-seek.

Cacalano and Alyssa Mayfield took turns at soloing, before they gave way to Laura Stokes, who entered with her fingers kneading the air above her head; drummer P.J. Roduta and bassist Jason Rafalak took  a similar approach to their instruments. A stationary arabesque took a sudden drop. There was rocking on the floor from side to side, followed by circular running that played off the musical accents by falling, all in all a good use of textures.

Cacalano programmed a duo and extended trio before Greene and Walsh took the stage. A couple that had grown apart? They began in opposite corners — she gradually working her way across the room to where he had been posturing on a cluster of large cubes. They touched, but did not look. Yet the two performers had a real connection in the dance.

Cacalano took her own connection into a duet with xylophonist Jeff Berman. The two had obviously worked before and were riding together on the same train of thought. I loved Cacalano’s squiggly walk to Berman’s tonal clusters and her shoulder lifts reflected in his pulsations. The lingering chords of the xylophone bore a resemblance to the connective issue of the movement. Often Cacalano, clad in a swishy white dress, and Berman seemed to evoke an airy environment laced with cushy clouds.

The evening concluded with the silent treatment (use your own headset) and overlapping abstracts of the previous material. It put everything in a new perspective and came out just as passionately fresh as what went on before.

See the next installment on the next Second Saturdays Sept. 12 — this one is called [Time Capture.]