JIM SELF AND DANCERS
Look at Scraping Bottoms, for example, a solo choreographed and performed by Self and costumed by Frank Moore, Self’s artistic partner. In this dance, Self was dressed in a highly stylized tuxedo, with the arms and legs somehow reinforced to look squared off, as if the dancer’s limbs were jointed two-by-fours. He performed a collection of erratic, explosive, pointing gestures, alternately exhibiting the rigid control of a ballet dancer and the flaccid spinelessness of a rag doll. At times he interacted with objects on the floor–a scrub brush, a telephone book, and three squares of polystyrene foam. At other times he spoke disjointed texts. “Hand?” he asked, looking at his hand. “No,” he answered. He asked similar questions about his head and his thigh, and gave the same answer. Then, while reaching upward, he asked, “Food? Shelter? Trust? Affection? Loyalty? Pride?” At which point he walked slowly away from the audience, turned to look at us, and quietly asked, “What was the question?”
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Self’s playfulness was also apparent in Beehive, a short film shown at the start of the program. Beehive, a collaboration between Self and Moore, depicted a cartoonish ballet world inside a hallucinatory beehive. Technically the film was masterful, with Moore’s ultrafunky set, Man Parrish’s ultrahip score, and Self’s ultraquirky bee choreography. This wildly colorful film, which told the story of a drone bee who inadvertently turned a worker bee into a queen, informed the audience that the evening could be full of work that was potentially silly. It was refreshing to see a choreographer with enough confidence to make fun of himself.
