I completely agree with Eli’s critique of this performance. I shared his feelings of annoyance and discomfort with the performance, not because it was beyond my intellectual capacity but because it felt like a bad turn of deja vu. I too was looking forward to a dance performance. I was prepared for some type of post modern dance piece, being that this performance was prefaced as something “Ralph doesn’t usually do” I was anticipating some form of non-conventional dance, even something reminiscent of contact improvisation was a possibility in my mind. But as Eli said the grand majority of this performance was not dance.
Despite the fact that Janine Durning is a dancer, we all agreed that “Inging” was a performance art piece, not a dance. Much like “Inging,” “Scaffold Room” did cover a wide range of seemingly unrelated topics, from trips to outer space, to anal sex, to surviving Hurricane Sandy in Manhattan. But where I feel the pieces differ was the purpose of their non linear topics. Janine spoke in an unscripted, unpredictable, and completely vulnerable fashion. She did not know what was going to come out, only that it was exactly what she was at that moment and in that way she shared an incredibly intimate part of her soul. “Scaffold Room” was scripted and the changes in subject were frequent and cyclical. She repeated and transcended topics as she pleased but many of them felt disingenuous. I didn’t feel emotionally connected to either of the women and I think that where Janine endeared us with her stream of consciousness, Lemon’s actresses confused and disenfranchised us further than if they had carried a more logical train of thought. I also think that the women in “Scaffold Room” were primarily actors, who did a decent amount of singing, and had very little dance influence in their performances.
Again, I do not believe I am mentally incapable of understanding the content of “Scaffold Room,” but instead of feeling engaged and trying to decipher if their was meaning behind her frequent costume, topic, and demeanor changes, I felt bored and confused. The video of her crying against a brick wall that was played in the beginning of the show, and the men’s dance routine at the end held my attention far more than anything the women did in the middle. Unfortunately, those two elements that I was able to connect with were never referenced, or tied into the center of the performance, which left me even more confused.
I agree with Eli’s point that just because a choreographer creates a piece it is not necessarily a dance. I am neither experienced nor totally comfortable with dance as an art form, and I took this class in hopes of educating and enriching myself into the wide variety of dance styles and cultures there are here in New York City. Living in the melting pot of global culture and history I figured this class would be the perfect opportunity for me to get to experience styles and periods of dance I never had before. As my classmates in Blog A have said I feel like we have seen very many, very similar performance pieces, and very few dance performances. I appreciate performance art as a style that requires dance elements to be successful, but as we wind closer to the end of the semester I am disappointed to realize the likelihood of me getting to see a ballet, salsa, musical theatre, African, or improvisational dance piece in New York City is slim to none. Maybe if “Scaffold Room” was the first as opposed to the fourth performance art piece we have seen as a class, I might have been more engaged and appreciative of what it had to offer us. But as it stands I was mostly just confused, frustrated, and disappointed with the exception of the two excerpts I enjoyed at the beginning and end.