Oberon's Grove: Jennifer Muller's BENCH @ Chelsea Art Museum

Wednesday November 4, 2009 - Kokyat and I attended a lecture/demonstration and performance of BENCH by Jennifer Muller/The Works at the Chelsea Art Museum. Held in the spacious 3rd floor gallery where a current exhibition of large canvasses by Jean Miotte were an added attraction to the event, the evening opened with Ms. Muller - having just celebrated the 35th anniversary of The Works - speaking of the influence of Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth and of finding a parallel line of inspiration in the idea of the Seven Deadly Sins. In the first of Kokyat's photos, above, Ms. Muller speaks as the dancers wait to demonstrate.

As a preview, Ms. Muller broke down passages from BENCH...

...and isolated certain pairs of dancers (Pascal Rekoert and Elizabeth Disharoon, above) to show individual movement phrases. She would then have the segment performed by the full ensemble so we could see how the elements coalesced.

After a brief break in which the dancers changed from their black practice clothes to the simple white costumes for BENCH, we were shown the entire work. Each aspect of the slow demise of our planet (shown in projections above the playing area) is viewed thru the dancers' physical references to the sins:

Lush Earth = Lust

Divided Earth = Pride

Covetous Earth = Envy

Abused Earth and Violated Earth = Greed

Violent Earth = Wrath

Consumed Earth = Gluttony

Desolate Earth = Sloth

Gen Hashimoto (foreground), Jen Peters, Abdul Latif in the air.

After so much destruction and despair, the work ends with a feeling of hope. Describing herself as an optimist, Ms. Muller concludes BENCH with a Prayer for Renewal:

Ms. Muller's diverse troupe of beautiful dancers are technically adept and wonderfully expressive of face and gesture. They and the choreographer were greeted with enthusiastic applause as they took their bows:

Seen earlier this year at The Joyce, BENCH was...

"...inspired by Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth,; it is a dance about culpability and grace set to the music of Jocelyn Pook. The piece traces the ecological destruction of the Earth due to destructive human behaviors through two simultaneous arcs: video projections of the Earth from its creation to its current state of devastation and movement portraying the negative human effects on nature. A piece for twelve dancers, each dancer is caught in a downward spiral of destructive behavior - loosely based on the seven deadly sins. The relationships between characters disintegrate, torn apart by jealousies, quarrels, power struggles and conflicting desires, leading to a series of catalytic events that disrupt the status quo. The bench itself represents greed and power, inertia, and eventually, a prayer for salvation. Bench asks for a transformation of disregard into responsibility, apathy into action and conflict into redemption".

Click on Kokyat's images to enhance the view. A gallery of more photographs from this event will appear here shortly.