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Friday night’s Performance Rampage, led by Circus Amok’s Jennifer Miller (right, on stilts). Photo by Jeff Larson

I didn’t get around to watching the “The Passion of Joan of Arc” this weekend, but I did participate in a Performance Rampage, which was part of Movement Research’s excellent spring festival. Immediately following Chase Granoff’s “thank you boredom” (for the Culturist’s take on that show, go here), the Rampage snaked its way down Eighth Avenue from 219 West 19th Street, where Dance Theater Workshop is located, and across the Village to Judson Memorial Church, the epicenter of MR’s activities. Along the way, we took in a moving feast of site-specific happenings, including this piece by Miguel Gutierrez et al:

Photo by Jeff Larson

These encounters, more like brief guerrilla actions than performances, were magical, but the best part, for me, was seeing how passers-by reacted to these impromptu events, and this exotic collection of people following behind them. People applauded, stared slack jawed, cracked comments and even joined us. The entire city felt charged, and activated - it felt, for an hour or so, that we were inside that mythical New York, a city of electricity and possibility, not bricks and mortar.

My three favorite moments were:

1. when a young woman yelled through an open bar window that it was her birthday, so we all serenaded her;

2. an irritating girl asked what we were doing, and one of our guides, without missing a beat, said we were “taking a cross-country walk.” The girl then turned to her friend and said, “I think they’re, like, making fun of me.”;

and 3., when Will Rawls and Kennis Hawkins of Dance Gang held up traffic to do a sexy little street dance and the cabbie, at the front of the stopped cars, patiently sat and watched without once trying his horn.

As Will said later, “The whole city came alive. That’s my ideal New York … a city of action and movement.”

And, speaking of Will … he needs your help. What are you doing tomorrow night? Maybe you would like to head to Monkey Town, where Will and some other contemporary artists have organized the interdisciplinary “Gang Up!: A Creative Congress.” Featuring the likes of Karinne Keathley, Neal Medlyn and Adam Matta, all of whom have donated their time, the benefit’s proceeds will help Will, Milka Djordjevich and Nohemi Contreras attend the prestigious ImpulsTanz festival in Vienna this summer. Will has received a scholarship to attend, but it doesn’t cover all the costs. Funding in America being what it is for young independent artists, he has had to embrace the entrepreneurial spirit.

“The donation of all of this work is amazing because it indicates a real commitment from artists to support other artists with art,” Will explained via email. “It represents a kind of manageability
of economics that is possible for performing artists - if we help each other out we can all survive. Even people that I don’t know very well responded to the call for work, even people I have never met.”

He continued (long quote warning, but it’s good stuff): “there is a real spirit of generosity that
we can benefit from and that is thriving across disciplines. And disciplines and their boundaries are changing. A local, sustainable model of economics has always been alive in this community, but it is ever more present now. Funding is still incredibly hard to procure, especially with short notice, and a lot of work that is being made now seems to be made on short notice, or in an experimental and improvisational spirit. This has a lot to do with breaking the mold of dance, but also has to do with breaking a mold of inertia that I have seen and felt since I have been in New York. It is time to make performance the way that visual artists make series of drawings, impromptu, small-scale studies. There is less of the exhausting gestalt-mindedness of having your own major show at a major theater….this work has had to find outlets beyond the outdated systems of producing work that exist now.”

Guerrilla action, indeed.