Dark Room with Crispin Spaeth Dance Group Dance Installation for 5 Dancers
30:00
2006


Performance History

T.B.A. Festival, Portland OR, September 15 - 17, 2006
Western Bridge, Seattle WA, February 17 - March 4, 2006


Description

 Performed in a lightless room for a small audience equipped with night vision apparatus, Dark Room turns military technology into an intimate tool, revealing a world completely unavailable to the naked eye. Flanked by audience, five dancers navigate a tight, pitch-black arena through touch and sound, moving with passionate, risk-filled innocence and uncanny skill.

The night vision apparatus puts the power in the hands of the audience – allowing a partially anonymous freedom while demanding active authorship on the part of the viewer. The dancers usher us beyond military, surveillance, and amateur porn applications of night vision technology. Stripped of the normal trappings of theater, the dance is absolutely central, an up-close world of trust, fear, sex, and compulsive, blind pursuit of human connection.

Dark Room is “lit” by a low-profile infrared system, and is accompanied by a dark, space-shifting electronic music score.

Dark Room was originally commissioned by the contemporary arts center, Western Bridge, and premiered as part of the show Crash.Pause.Rewind February - March of 2006. Following its sold-out premiere run at Western Bridge, Dark Room was invited to appear as part of Portland Institute of Contemporary Arts Time Based Arts Festival in September of 2006. www.pica.org

Production Credits:
Original Cast: Heather Budd, Drew Elliott, Kathy Lawson, Chay Norton, and Jules Skloot
Choreographer: Crispin Spaeth
Composer: Yann Novak
Production Director: Jon Harmon
Costume Designer: Etta Lilienthal


Reviews

The rest of the run for Crispin Spaeth Dance Group's Dark Room at Western Bridge is sold out, but it is a show that people are talking about, and will keep talking about. It is a dance piece that messes with the conventions of performance, but it is also a commanding work of visual art that, in its provocative enactment of mediated viewing, references filmmaking, photography, pornography, and video games.

The performance happens in a pitch-black room. The audience is given hand-held night-vision scopes. The bodies are only visible in the scopes, glowing green and not quite convincing as real humans. The audience of 20 is seated in bean bags on either side of the carpet where the dancers perform, and the dancers' heavy use of the floor draws the gaze across the room to the row of gawkers on the opposite side of the stage, clutching scopes to their faces like innocent '50s moviegoers in 3-D glasses, or crouching soldiers in a nighttime offensive, or perverted spies.

The dancers throw each other to the ground, sashay flirtatiously, threaten each other, and rarely reveal their blindness despite the brashness and complexity of Crispin Spaeth's choreography. It is a tour de force of sex, violence, trust, and fear, performed by Heather Budd, Drew Elliott, Kathy Lawson, Chay Norton, and Jules Skloot to a minimalist, often arrhythmic sound composition by Yann Novak—another territory in which the dancers must find their way without much to guide them. Put down your scope and all you get is blackness, punctuated by breathing and the quiet sound of steps. It's as though the dancers exist inside the scopes instead of in the room.
– Jen Graves (Blind on Blind, The Stranger)


Crispin Spaeth has been turning the lights down for a couple of years, making works designed to be seen in the half-light where our peripheral vision registers movement before our brains interpret it. As a frog catching flies—our first response is physical, from the gut not the head. In Dark Room, she takes the inevitable next step and turns the lights out altogether, presenting a dance we cannot see without high-tech help. Night-vision scopes reduce the world to an illusive, furtive place and transform the performers into targets. Our field of vision narrowed by the scopes, we scan back and forth searching for a landmark. When dancers do appear in our sights, it's often an abrupt moment, as if they had stumbled into view accidentally. That may be the case, since they are performing in the dark without electronic aids. They are blind, and with Yann Novak's static-laced score short-circuiting any aural clues, they have only their sense of gravity by which to orient themselves. Hesitant reaching and careful gliding would be the safe choices in that environment, so that when they actually spin or fall they appear almost heroic—a jump is indeed a leap into the unknown.

Watching these green-glowing figures through tiny lenses is just as disorienting as it sounds. About half the audience has monoculars, so their depth perception is circumvented, too, but even when we are looking with both eyes, the performers seem like apparitions floating through our visual field. Standing still, they have a halo, and moving, they leave a trail—this is a dance with actual ghosts instead of the trumped-up versions in 19th-century ballet. As our eyes strain to find them, and our hands grip the expensive scopes trying keep them in view, they slip in and out of focus, looming over us for a moment, then dissolving into a generalized fuzziness. If we hadn't seen them before the lights went down, kneeling in front of us, explaining how the equipment worked, and then gently putting it into our hands, we wouldn't really know if they were there at all.

In the heyday of conceptual dance, we were often invited to "watch" performances that were happening in other rooms, other buildings, or other cities, simply by being told that they existed. But by "blinding" the performers and putting us in the same room with the tools to see them, Spaeth has gone further than that postmodern device. In her press materials, she talks about "repurposing military surveillance technology," and those disquieting connections are easy to draw as the scopes put the audience behind a version of a one-way mirror. But alongside those ideas, the experience of hunting for the dance in the dark is as powerful as any kinetic reaction to the movement we find. Dark Room is as much about the act of looking as it is about anything we might actually see.
– Sandra Kurtz (In the Dark,The Seattle Weekly)


I spy.

You spy.

We all spy -- with night-vision-enhanced eyes -- dancers in the dark.

Big Brother merges with dance in "Dark Room," an aptly titled installation commissioned by Western Bridge art gallery and performed by the Crispin Spaeth Dance Group.

For 25 minutes, Spaeth asks her dancers to voluntarily give up their sight.

When the lights go out, the plunge into darkness is complete.

All they have is each other as they clutch hands, torsos and legs, using their bodies as their GPS.

Meanwhile, the audience surrounds them, 20 Peeping Toms armed with night-vision goggles trained on the five dancers and their nocturnal unrest.

The night-vision goggles, supplied by Washington-based Rigel Optics, are usually the stuff of stealth military missions and stakeouts. But Deb Gunderson, Rigel's office manager, said the company's sales of night-vision monoculars, binoculars and goggles is split between military/law enforcement and civilians. Hunters, bird-watchers, campers, paint-ballers, bat-cavers and even paranormal investigators have snapped up the technology.

Gunderson said that within the past year, the company even supplied Dining in the Dark fund-raisers in which waitstaff use the devices to serve blind patrons. But this is the first time Rigel has sold goggles for a performance.

Spaeth's dance installation is the only performance in the "Crash. Pause. Rewind." exhibition, a conscious decision by Western Bridge director Eric Fredericksen.

"When we were putting together 'Crash. Pause. Rewind.," it kind of came as a flash," said Fredericksen, who knew Spaeth had been contemplating a piece incorporating night-vision technology but had tabled it until it could be funded.

"The rest of the show is a bit more tightly focused on a specific theme and her show is more general. The way she's created it, it's a very open piece, very abstract."

In November, he commissioned the performance and Spaeth started pulling it together in December, an abbreviated process considering it usually takes about six months to stage a dance with original choreography.

Western Bridge is now the proud owner of five night-vision goggles, while Spaeth bought another five. About a dozen are rented.

Fredericksen said the other pieces in the exhibit focus on "endings and destruction. That sort of imagery has a perverse attraction. In the same way, voluntarily placing yourself in complete darkness and the compression of viewing through the goggles is a really compelling example of the way we can seek out experiences that on the face don't seem pleasant."

Amid car crashes, violent scenes reimagined as video-game snapshots and tragic Danish film stills and other pieces in the exhibit that remove people from the scene, Spaeth's piece is the only one in which living, breathing people are the focus.

"Our work is the anti-tragedy, though it could be a disaster at any moment," she said.

Influenced by media images of tragedy and the temptation to look at them over and over again, Spaeth felt particularly drawn -- and disturbed -- by how much of the war in Iraq was being fought at night. Footage projected home showed fuzzy, grainy images of soldiers in full gear, darkness punctuated by bomb blasts.

She thought about military technology's superhuman effect. "Everything about weapons and guns are meant to exaggerate something the body does," she said. "Especially night-vision technology as a tool for hand-to-hand combat."

The performance flips the audience into active participants removed from their safe space far away from the stage. Spaeth envisioned "Dark Room" observers as similar to basketball game spectators, split into two sides of the room sunk into mini-bean-bags pressed up against the walls.

"Once we started working with the goggles, all the rules were gone," Spaeth said.

In conquering natural anxiety about working in the dark, the dancers used the carpet to define their space and memorized the room's layout. They practiced in the dark and with blindfolds. Contact reassures the dancers, who keep their hands on their partners during much of the performance.

Throughout Spaeth's work -- such as "Dark Room" precursor "FADE: dis/appearances" -- she said one dominant theme emerges: "Human connection and how miraculous it is anyone finds each other."

Using the surveillance equipment, the audience becomes witness to the vulnerability in intimate moments, moments persuasively relayed by dancers who, for the most part, act as if the audience is not there.

Bathed in sage light, the dancers appear underneath what seems almost like spotlights shining on them from some alien aircraft hovering above. When those lights go off, it's like being in space, watching stars streak by, an out-of-body experience.

There's a scene in the film "The Age of Innocence" when it's apparent the audience is as preoccupied with checking each other out with their opera glasses as much as the performance in front of them. There are moments during "Dark Room" when the urge to turn the voyeuristic lens on each other is just as irresistible.

Removing the goggles makes for a disorienting experience. The steady bass and hum of Yann Novak's score only serves to increase the dissonance. You know they're in front of you. You can hear their breathing, their movements against one another, but it does not compute. Until you bring the goggles back down and you're allowed again to glimpse this invisible world.

This is one performance in which the audience's experience is as vital as the dance.

"That's where art starts," Spaeth said.
– Athima Chansanchai (Night-vision goggles needed to view these dancers in the dark,The Seattle Post Intellegencer)