Review: Conditions Critical

Village Voice

JANUARY 19, 1993

Reeves / Jones

At DIA Arts Center

Theresa Reeves and Kevin Jones of New York and Matha Carter of Montreal created disturbing, hallucinatory worlds in DIA’S pristine space - the first through narrative, the second through eerie juxtaposition of light, sound, and motion.

Carter’s intriguing Conditions Critical invokes a place of subtle, delicate danger. Stephen Hughe’s dark, isolated beams of light illumine hanging sheets of glass, some with crumbled shards lying beneath them on mirrors (décor by Pierre Tanguay with Laurent Painchaud). A fire glares in the darkness and is extinguished. Tall Paul Caskey hurls himself around the space like a bull in a china shop: the hanging panels sway, and we feel him both threat and threatened. AnneMarie Girmoux pants softly behind one panel, smudging the glass with her breath, pressing against it, making as if (Oh God) to gnaw its sharp edge.

The glass resounds when struck or scraped against the floor or crunched underfoot - both live and in Allan Paivio’s sound score. The four dancers not only do calisthenics and march in strong forthright accumulating patterns, they vocalize. They talk quietly, whisper, and chant - sometimes in ravishing harmonies that hang and shimmer amid the glass. The four can be individually assertive:

Suzanne Miller stamps like a flamenco dancer, Stephen Hughes takes off his pants, wriggles and pumps like a stripper. But the glass world dominates them with its beauties, its dangers, its fragility, its implicit rules; it might be a paradigm for our own. I begin - perhaps a little late - to notice purpose within this society, and I’m not surprised when a woman undresses and climbs up to drop forward and hang over the big glass at the back: a voluntary sacrifice looking disturbingly like a carcass in a butcher’s icehouse.