Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey combine their yearlong collaborations in TOOL IS LOOT (image design by Adam Shecter)
The Kitchen
512 West 19th St. between Tenth & Eleventh Aves.
September 22-24, September 29 – October 1, $15, 8:00
212-255-5793 ext11
www.thekitchen.org
Over the course of the last year, dancers and choreographers Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey held week-long collaborations with experts from outside the dance world to create unique pieces incorporating a range of disciplines, from science and architecture to social activism and wine, each of which began with an “empty solo.” The Brooklyn-based Cardona and the Paris-based Lacey will present the results of their experimental year — Cardona’s “Interventions” and Lacey’s “My First Time with a Dramaturg” — in TOOL IS LOOT, a duet running September 22-24 and September 29 – October 1 at the Kitchen. Curated by Yasuko Yokoshi and featuring original music by Jonathan Bepler (The Cremaster Cycle) and lighting by Thomas Dunn, TOOL IS LOOT explores artistic identity through a “performance-based process of aesthetic disorientation.” (To read our February 2011 twi-ny talk with Cardona about the project, please click here.)
Jennifer Lacey has an onstage fling with a chair in TOOL IS LOOT
Update: In putting together TOOL IS LOOT, Wally Cardona and Jennifer Lacey spent a year apart, the former holding Interventions with experts from non-dance fields in upstate Troy, Washington, DC, Florida, and New York City, while the latter did her research, “My First Time with a Dramaturg,” overseas. That physical separation continues through much of TOOL IS LOOT, which begins with Lacey performing a duet with a folding chair, representing not only the body as object but referring to the no-longer-present collaborators Cardona and Lacey worked with over the past twelve months. Later, Cardona comes out to have his own private rendezvous with another chair, in the guise of a prince who has fallen in love with a sailor. During the seventy-five-minute production, the two performers move alternately to Jonathan Bepler’s ever-changing score, to silence, or to offstage narration dictated by the other. And yes, eventually, they do meet, leading to a beautiful if somewhat baffling conclusion. Continuing at the Kitchen Thursday through Saturday, TOOL IS LOOT is a humorous, subtly charming meditation on sexuality, style, and storytelling as well as the art of collaboration itself.