Performance stills from reVerb: A performative collaboration by Kara Rooney and Taryn Vander Hoop/Summation Dance at Fridman Gallery, NY June 15-16, 2016.
Installation: Kara Rooney
Choreography: Taryn Vander Hoop
Dancers: Allie Lochary, Kara Rooney, Taryn Vander Hoop, Megan Wubbenhorst
Sound: John Stanesco
Better to start in the middle, blank, with a fragment, a piece of discarded plaster, the cut snippet of a photograph, texture, surface, covered in a half-legible scrawl:
Hydrocal fingernails bleach
The stain of labor
_______________________________
Clumps of prose
Nonesense
Clutter
_______________________________
_______________________________
On a fig leaf, you eat the leftovers of your gods
reVerb is an immersive performative experience that combines visual and auditory stimuli —sculptural objects, site-specific installation, spoken word, and sound—with the participatory aspects of theater and dance. Forged in collaboration between Kara Rooney and choreographer Taryn Vander Hoop, this piece extends each artist’s enquiry into the fracturing effects of memory and its impact on individual experience, emphasized through the orchestration of bodies and objects in space.
Building upon Vander Hoop’s background in postmodern dance in addition to Rooney’s visual experiments with the glitch or rupture, these artists have constructed a hybrid work that reflects on ideas such as illusion, gravity, balance, and decay. Taking ritualistic gesture as a point of entry, they enlist the body as register for further investigating the crisis or breaking point of modern language. Rooney’s sculptural forms are either inhabited by or possess potential for activation by the dancers, both in terms of their mobility and fragility of composition, while Vander Hoop’s choreography utilizes the temporal polarities of speed and stasis as additional methods of opposition and discovery. Through this interactive play, the performer’s movements echo the same slippage of interpretative device that occurs between linguistic interaction, memory, and event, disrupting linear reading or narrative progression. Spoken word and sound are utilized throughout the performance as a means of amplifying the work’s poetic origins. Through this physical exchange and collision of materials, both corporeal and auditory, reVerb probes the instability of language and memory in the narration of social and gendered histories, repositioning the body as a potential site of resistance.
See full video of the live performance at vimeo.com/171987823