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The notable exception was Krista Willberg’s strikingly inventive Waiting for Pancakes. Willberg, dressed in cotton panties and a huge white T-shirt, begins the piece upstage, sitting with her arms resting on her knees and staring at an offstage television that we could hear but not see. After a few moments, in an utterly engaging imitation of a bored child, she lets her legs flop to the floor and then bats them back up into place, as if her body were a kooky toy that she was just learning to operate. Then she discovers her T-shirt, pulling it down over her feet and drawing her arms inside–a big white polyp with a little girl’s head. Willberg goes on to create several ingenious images by stretching her T-shirt into different shapes. She pulls it over the top of her head to become a mother superior. She squats and pulls it over her knees, giving herself enormous breasts. She hooks the bottom of the T-shirt over one foot and stands up, making her look like nothing on earth.
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Willberg, who had perfect control of her body and her materials, had obviously devoted much time and thought to this piece. Every image that she presented–each “discovered,” as if she were simply playing, amusing herself in the midst of her boredom–was clearly drawn and skillfully articulated. Waiting for Pancakes had no heavy message, but it captured a naive wonder, making a plain white T-shirt a remarkably expressive tool, thrilling in its suppleness, its mutability, and its utter ordinariness.
On Husbands, choreographed and performed by Julia Mayer, left me more confused than enlightened. Mayer, in a plain brown dress, performs a series of enigmatic, codelike gestures while sections of Marilyn Stablein’s The Census Taker are read in voice-over. The text has to do with an imaginary primitive culture that has no word for husband but only synonyms, such as “saddle,” “knife,” and “bell fruit.” But constructing some relationship between text and dancer seemed impossible. At one point the voice describes surrogate husbands–husbands for hire–and Mayer makes several sharp gestures as if she were dividing the air in front of her into two-foot lengths. This initially seemed evocative–as if this female-centered fantasy world were just as obsessed with regulation and demarcation, just as restrictive of gender roles as our own. But this gesture came and went in unfocused moments, and when Mayer repeated it at different points later, its rhetorical effectiveness was greatly weakened.
Mother Goose Lives in the Loop, which equates typical urban characters–the banker, the broker, the bag lady–with fairy-tale archetypes, was simply embarrassing to watch. None of the actors seemed comfortable, and the ideas behind the piece were sophomoric. The brokers, for example, who continually gloated “We’re moving up!” suddenly turned into Jack and Jill, who of course came tumbling down their hill. Unfocused and confused, this piece made me wonder what had attracted Knowles’s interest in the first place.
