SARAH BRUMGART
Her dances remind me of experiments in which almost all the variables have been eliminated, or of a musician’s exercises or an artist’s doodles. Over the last two or three years, Brumgart has created a whole series of Silent White Dances; at MoMing she danced Silent White Dance XVII and Silent White Dance XVIII (a premiere) as well as excerpts from Silent White Dances I and XV. It was obvious, even without the lengthy question-and-answer period that followed the performance, that in each Brumgart had set herself a certain task or tasks; a program note let us know that, although each piece had a basic choreographic structure, the specific movements were improvised during each performance.
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In XVIII, the first dance she performed, Brumgart moved from an upstage standing position to a position facing the audience only a few feet away, and back to her original upstage position. She achieved the movement by propelling herself through a series of balances, her arms and legs moving slowly and continuously, almost machinelike. The excerpt from XV was a series of turns: stiff-legged turns without arms, turns with one arm raised, turns with two arms raised, turns with curved arms, turns with arms held high, until her moves became quite elaborate. In the excerpt from I, Brumgart began flat on her back on the floor and ended flat on her back. In between she experimented with different ways in which her body could make solid, sustained contact with the floor but still be raised above it–as if she were building a human bridge. In XVII, subtitled “99,” Brumgart did a series of quirky movements that sometimes showed the influence of ballet or jazz, but they were so isolated and out of context that each was more like a letter of the alphabet than like a word, much less a sentence. Each of these improvised phrases was numbered, and Brumgart spoke the number of each phrase aloud before she did it, until she reached 99.
But the intense boredom I experienced, although it may be a heightened state of consciousness all its own, can’t be what Brumgart intends. What role is the audience supposed to have in this meditation, this experiment in movement? One audience member actually asked this question, wondering whether there might not be some conflict between movement for movement’s sake and movement intended to present a visual image to an audience. Brumgart’s responses were telling: she first said there was no conflict, and then that there was–but that she tried to balance the two motives. It occurs to me that the impurity in this purist is the maniacal search for purity itself. Brumgart is willfully blind to the fact that, in the context in which she presents it, dance is not pure–it’s theatrical, egotistical, and even exhibitionistic.
