The Kitchen and Performance Space 122 presented Heather Kravas’s a quartet as part of the ninth COIL Festival. (For a brief explanation of the Festival, see The New Yorker.) As I watched the piece on the opening night, Wednesday, January 8th, I thought a lot about the relationship between the dancers and the audience, as well as our experience of the dance as audience members. This was due in part to the intimacy of the performance space, the second-floor gallery of The Kitchen. The audience sat in folding chairs on the two long sides of the space, so we faced each other. Kravas, and the musician/composer Dana Wachs, who performs as Vorhees, shared one of the short sides. The dancers were seated on the other short side. Until they stood and walked to the opposite end of the space to line up, I had no idea that they were the performers. The nature of the choreography also made me think about the connection between the audience and the piece. There was a lot of precision and repetition, which created a feeling of training or drills. It made the work seem functional and unadorned, rather than performative and decorative. I wondered […]
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