Clothing acts as prop in Mandle's "costume-designed" performance
pieces Return (2001; above) and Erika (2000; below).
On a breezy July night last summer 1,300 people gathered in a Brooklyn factory
courtyard to watch the work-in-progress preview of Return, a performance
conceived and directed by 31-year-old artist Julia Mandle. Four dancers
appeared on a rooftop wearing bright red costumes, each carrying a stylized
folding chair. The spare synchronized choreography had an angular quality
emphasized by the costumes, which were equipped with silhouette-changing
flaps, and by the use of the chairs, which snapped open and closed
like giant red scissors.
The finished production debuts this month at the Gale Gates art space,
in the Dumbo neighborhood of Brooklyn. Mandle--whose aesthetic is influenced
by former employers architect Steven Holl and theater director Robert Wilson--describes
her work as "costume-defined choreography," in which the
dancers' movements are determined by the construction of the clothes they're
wearing. In 1998's Kalch, performed outdoors in Lower Manhattan, the dancers
wore constraining costumes and heavy chalk shoes. "I built the costume
around the silhouette of a shovel, one arm connected to the middle of the
other," she says. "Putting five- to ten-pound shoes on the
performers also dictated the kind of movement we were able to do."
Like much of Mandle's work, Kalch was site specific, functioning as
urban-archaeology-through-movement: the dancers, using the chalk shoes,
literally mapped an element of Manhattan's vanished landscape--Collect Pond,
filled in sometime in 1821 as the city grew--onto the city's contemporary
surface.
Offsite:
J. Mandle Performance's new project will be presented at Gale Gates, 37
Main Street, at Water Street, Brooklyn, December 5--22 at 8 p.m. Box
office: (718) 522-4597 or
www.galegates.org. Return will be adapted
for two performances at BAX/Brooklyn Arts Exchange on January 4--5;
for information call (718) 832-0018.
"Most of my projects have been outside, either completely or in part,
working with audiences who were free to come and go," Mandle says.
"With Return I'm working for the first time with theatrical strategy--looking
at lighting design and having fixed audience seating areas." This
new work is inspired by the experience one of Mandle's relatives had coming
home from World War II. The audience will follow performers through the
8,000-square-foot space, which has been divided into distinct areas. "The
way I worked with this open room was to create very different shapes that
all relate to the concept of the scene," she says. "There will
be this very long corridor, for example, relating to the long journey home."
