LINK’S HALL CHANCE DANCE PERFORMANCE FEST
For his dance, The Third Anniversary of the 1st Cub’s Nite Game on 8-8-88 or Without Normal Speech, Eisen uses a technique borrowed from Merce Cunningham. Five minutes before each performance, Eisen and his three dancers pick numbers from a hat to determine the order in which individual phrases and sections of the dance will be performed. Eisen’s method makes hash of any kind of story the dancers may be trying to tell, or any story the audience is trying to hear. Without a story, dramatic emotions and symbols disappear, replaced by the expressive gesture. Eisen uses chance techniques to simply see the body.
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By including the physical idiosyncrasies of his performing space–its lighting fixtures, windows, doors, and electrical outlets–Eisen emphasizes chance even more than Cunningham. Eisen’s use of chance is like Jackson Pollack throwing paint at a canvas to bypass rational technique; or like the surrealist poets who scanned thousands of lines of computer-generated words, looking for an absurd but resonant line of poetry. Chance strips away our knowledge of the world and control over it, until in our nakedness we become more like children who can be struck with wonder.
