It was not until later that it became clear to the audience what role the projection screen and large pile of synthetic, cloudlike material would play in Brian Brooks’ dance performance/screening last Saturday evening at the ’92 Theater.
Before the performance began, the audience observed Brooks, the founder of the Brian Brooks Moving Company, prepare for the highly physical evening. Having set aside part of the stage as a dressing area, Brooks stripped out of his warm-up clothing and slipped into a full suit and tie, adjusting his collar and tucking in his shirt. He stood in heavy shadow. A single, blue upstage light revealed Brooks, the projection screen, the enormous pile of fabric that looked like plastic marshmallow fluff, a large white square of material stage right, and a fuchsia band of fabric spanning the downstage edge. Before the performance began, an usher warned the audience that anyone with latex allergy should vacate the theater.
Over the course of the performance, aptly tiled “I am Going to Explode (and other dances),” Brooks alternated live performance with screenings of self-made short films, some of which portray him dancing in subway stations, a K-mart, and on street corners in an orange spandex body suit. Others videos involved simple animation of colored boxes, dancing stick figures and repeated images of pink flamingoes.
In the first and longest of the series of videos, Brooks travels to a number of different locations around Manhattan to dance in unexpected spaces, including on a stage at South Street Seaport and in Times Square. Towards the end of the film, his voice-over narration states that, “dance had become a constant amidst the chaos of the city.”
Brooks pieced together the one-man show from a decade of performance work. He opened the performance with the title piece, created this year. Set to a pulsing background of LCD Soundsystem, the piece displayed Brooks’s penchant for simple, repeated movements that build into a set of variations on a theme. He wore shoes but no socks, losing and regaining control of his body, isolating particular muscles to invoke a style of movement that looked programmed and revealed a love for deliberate, serious play.
Brooks built on the theme of isolated movement in a series of short pieces involving a set of color-themed outfits and unexpected props. Most memorably, a single light pink balloon that Brooks batted into the audience soon evolved into a room full of audience members playing “keep it up” with Brooks. After having the audience play with a few balloons he himself inflated, Brooks then threw a hundred or so uninflated balloons into the audience and bounced up and down until he received the desired response. Members of the audience frantically blew up the balloons and flung them in Brooks’s general direction.
The performance culminated with the inflation of the marshmallow fabric into a 30-foot long, 12-foot high white oblong shape that took over most of Brooks’s performance space. By then, the audience seemed to have become increasingly accustomed to Brooks’s clever, if puerile, manner of movement and expression.
In the talk-back session after the performance, Brooks discussed his love of the investigative process of movement. He invited audience members to take off their shoes and sit with him on the quickly deflating marshmallow blimp, an offer that only three people accepted. Seated crosslegged on the pile of fabric and kicking around remaining rogue balloons, Brooks absolutely beamed with pure, simple excitement. In the end, that was maybe the best part.
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