AGORA II
Sens/ Noémie Lafrance
McCarren Park Pool
Lorimer St. between Driggs & Bayard Ave
Brooklyn, New York
box office
September 13 - 30 2006,
By ELLEN PEARLMAN
If you closed your eyes at Times Square at noon, or Union Square on a warm Friday night when the skateboarders are out, or the Fulton Street Mall the day before a bustling holiday you would find the thematic substratum for Lafrance’s newest work, Agora II. Set within the 50,000 square foot McCarren pool in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Agora II wrestles images of daily life out from their context and using a cast of 60, pops them back into La France’s Magnum opus. Drawing on a rich tradition dating from 1960s of happenings and Fluxus events, updated with lessons learned from the German dancers Pina Bausch and Sasha Walz, Le France tackles the chaos of mass communications and multimedia spectacles and throws in audience interaction. Agora II is much better thought out, paced, lit and sound designed than its predecessor, the original Agora from last year. The sheer number of choreographed parts would make any theatrical person’s head spin. It began with different “teams” from the audience finger snapping and clapping along with the performers. Two people solemnly marched in carrying a body, their shadows increasing to a giant size. The body was laid down and disappeared into a trench. Dancers asked the audience questions. A girl in a huge bonnet extended a cup of tea to a never-appearing recipient. Salomé-like wraiths ran by a monk/death figure who threw down clattering boards. Men in suits gyrated using hula hoops. A girl in sweats yelled into a bullhorn. Audience members jumped in and strode across the pool. An astronaut danced in a space suit and a guy bicycled while vocal sampling into a microphone. Two dancers frolicked in a real small plastic pool filled with water while otherscollapsed of gas or asphyxiation, coughing to death. A seated guy in a suit and tie watched TV and pushed himself and his chair all over the place.
TV Man was one of the multitude of recurring images who first surfaced in the original Agora. Another was the woman in the red dress with a long red train carrying red suitcases. She ran willy nilly, then collapsed. A red carpet was rolled out and a male boy toy strutted down the carpet as the audience hooted. A crazed, shrilly screaming bride and her groom rolled on the carpet.
The most ingenious choreography involved skateboards strapped onto the dancers backs, forcing them to perform kicking and prone. When the theme tune from the Twilight Zone came on some dancers stripped naked. Their flesh was not erotic, just statuesque, their skin seeming like just another costume. The nudes collapsed, evoking for me the image of the carnage of exploded bodies in Iraq. The bodies dressed themselves and the piece ended, but no one in the audience wanted to leave, and most jumped into the pool to continue the celebration. The spectacle became one big happy party and the lines between performer and audience vanished.
Ellen Pearlman is an Editor-at-large for The Brooklyn Rail and the receipent of numerous awards including an Asian Cultural Council Rockefeller Grant and a Banff Mountain Culture Grant. Currently she is working on "Nothing and Everything - the Influence of Buddhism on the New York Avant Garde" for Wesleyan University Press.
