October 16–23, 1997

dance

Steve Krieckhaus

Painted Bride, Oct. 10-11

For the last 15 years Steve Krieckhaus has performed, mostly alone but sometimes with others, here in Philadelphia, across the United States, and around the world. He has received numerous awards (Pew, NEA, Guggenheim), and many people whose judgment I esteem think highly of him. More importantly, he has a large local following, and the Bride was packed last weekend. By happenstance, I had never seen him until then, which he had announced would be his last public performance. In view of these unusual circumstances, I am sorry to say that I came away ambivalent from this, my first and last exposure to his work. I think I see what his fans admire, but perhaps because his work is not immediately accessible, I cannot say that minute to minute I greatly enjoyed the performance.

Given its valedictory character, the program might easily have consisted of a retrospective collection of earlier pieces, but Krieckhaus presented only new work, all created within the last year. The first half was made up of The Cerulean Plain, a movement piece, and The Brothers K., a performance piece; the second half contained sections of a longer work, Volumes of Imaginary Hours. The Brothers K. was the weakest part of the program. In it, Krieckhaus thrust forward his lower jaw and, thus transformed into something like Popeye the Sailor, affected the voice and character of a crusty and cranky old man offering a monologue about his recently deceased brother. This presumably was for comic effect, except that it wasn't funny, not even a little, although some of the audience found it amusing. Cerulean was performed without music, and the stage was dotted with literally cut-down versions of a dozen ordinary domestic objects: half a suitcase, half a chair, etc. There was nothing especially dreamlike about his movement, however, and nothing was made of these surreal objects; he neither touched them nor referred to them. With the exception of the domestic objects, which did not reappear, Cerulean resembled parts of Imaginary Hours.

Imaginary Hours consisted of six sections, mostly silent although a few were accompanied by waves of music, and a few by projections of handsome color photographs. Several images recurred, which acted as minimal structural elements: a chair, sometimes large and sometimes small, that may suggest the absent father; repeated writhing movement on the floor toward the chair. The photos in one section were of a bleak, disused factory or railyard; in another of windows, sometimes taken from outside, sometimes taken through them. Overall these motifs contributed to a feeling of remoteness and sadness, although the last section may contain a spark of something else.

Imaginary Hours began with Krieckhaus propelling himself slowly across the stage on the floor toward a box of tissues. The goal attained, he covered his body with tissues, making himself into a kind of mummy. Stacking the tissues and balancing them on one hand, he proceeded to move in a series of vigorous squatlike movements toward the empty chair. The next section was a brief blackout in which we saw him standing in the middle of the stage wearing an aviatorlike helmet. A pencil of light was projected across the stage that seemed to go directly through his head. We then had a scene in which, wearing green gloves, he danced in his characteristic straight-backed, twisting, upper-body-only style. The next episode began with him approaching an armchair, before which stood a pair of Wellington boots filled with water. Inserting his feet in these, which naturally caused some overflow, he walked about. He then draped the chair in large sheets and placed more sheets in front of it—a white carpet before the throne of the absent monarch? After the water was mopped up, a rocking chair illuminated in a pool of light shared the stage with numerous photos of derelict machinery; during this overlong section Krieckhaus was offstage.

The final two parts contained more dancing than any of the others. In the penultimate one he repeatedly circled the stage, all the while doing his characteristic twisting hand and body movement. In the last part he stayed stage left, offering a good deal of strenuous dancing, while the right half of the stage was taken up by photos of windows. At first these were small apertures and the photos were shot through them from within; these modulated into windows seen from without and growing gradually larger. Enigmatic to the end, and possibly emblematic of some inner reconciliation. The last frame dedicated the work to his father, who died of Alzheimer's this year.

Krieckhaus is a leading practitioner of contact improvisation, often used as an exercise in which one's movements arise as a series of reactions to other dancers. Being a solo performer, however, makes everything a lot harder. Krieckhaus has no one to react against and is thus thrown back entirely on the surrounding space and his own emotions and imagination. The danger inherent in this method is the romantic assumption that because a gesture may indeed be an authentic emanation from an interior state of being, that fact alone justifies its being performed. Even more than most dancers, then, he must edit his work with olympian detachment. To have worked for so many years in this way, Krieckhaus must long since have dismissed such misgivings, but to me, a newcomer to his art, he seems not entirely to have found a way to guard against this tendency toward excessive inwardness and hermeticism.

-Robert Ackerman