The Brooklyn Rail

Persistence has many faces: determination, obstinacy, dogged curiosity. These modes of persisting make themselves known in the body through methods that touch the limits of physical endurance in ways large and small. In their double bill at NYU Skirball, Ivy Baldwin and Jeanine Durning explored durational aspects of practice and performance, such that the program itself became an exercise in sustained attention and a meditation on presence.

Durning’s Body Goes extends the choreographer and performer’s ongoing practice of “nonstopping,” an improvisational tactic and compositional method that channels the currents of body, mind, and voice through outpourings of perpetual motion. The duet builds its textural layers on the stage’s bare bones, black-on-black-on-black across its spare scenic, prop, and costume elements. All are revealed and obscured in turn by Amanda K. Ringger’s evocative lighting: rows of conduit on the rear wall above gleam red-hot to frame the work’s opening and closing, while the heart of its material cycles through arcs of cool-to-warm and dim-to-bright with pointed affective subtlety. The sound score, mixed and performed live by Tian Rotteveel, threads through as an equal player in their shared arena of nonstop activity.

A looping trumpet melody haunts the work from the start, rising almost imperceptibly out of the air. Durning enters and exits through a door at the proscenium’s edge, her entire being busy from the moment she appears: measuring, manipulating, and contending with herself and an assortment of objects within her reach. She twists open the spigot of what will become a near-constant stream of wordplay, establishing her associative tactics in the sphere of spoken language. All the while, she moves: a movement monologue built on off-kilter, pedestrian strides and pivots as her arms fold, fan, and stutter through geometries that juxtapose the mutually-illuminating cadences of body and voice.

With Durning’s premise thus laid out, dancer Molly Poerstel joins in. From the outset, the formal precision of her vocabulary remains entirely unpredictable as she holds both fluid and angular qualities without splashes or hard edges. Her painterly hands become brushes and blades, punctuated by the sudden, electric splay of her fingers; she completes turns on a dime, anchored through the entire surface of a bare foot, and etches jumps in midair with palpable full-bodied awareness. Her efforts are perfectly calibrated: no deficit, no waste, never lingering nor hesitating. Poerstel and Durning orbit each other like freeform celestial bodies whose gravities draw them only occasionally into consonance or contact. As their nonstoppings spill out, I experience a strange, interpenetrating synesthesia—seeing through words and hearing through movement—that amasses tension and volume in tandem with the ambient sound that spreads through chord progressions on piano and crackles with percussion over spare, plangent trumpet melodies.

Materials intrude on their conversations in the form of props—a stool, a block, a bolster—and crumpled mountains of black plastic that Durning lurks behind to steer in pursuit of Poerstel. Articulations and interactions recur and iterate as they tumble together with their props down a long, diagonal roll of black mat to settle beside each other in a downstage corner. Their fidgeting fades as the sonic cloud recedes, and they leave us with their words, and finally their silence, still in motion, circling whether and where to stay or go. Either path is surely endless.

A study in consonance and contrast, Baldwin’s Rumen shows its persistence in the slow evolutions and sudden ruptures of its cinematic landscapes. The work’s title references the first stage of the digestive tracts of “ruminant” animals—cud-chewers like cows, to which she also makes reference in the work’s dappled cowhides and eerily guttural cow sounds—and points to the quality of rumination that churns at its core. Razor-thin sheaves of sound slice through the performers’ pitched lowing, yielding in turn to fragments of vintage film dialogue and the sweeping dramatics of their orchestral scores. Sensory inputs generate resonance and friction, heightened by Ringger’s lurid multidirectional saturations of color that highlight and estrange the four bodies as they stretch, tumble, and spin across the still-barebones stage. Here, a shifting color block highlights the immense square of its loading bay door, cracked open a few ominous inches.

Baldwin predicates her movement language on sensation: the slap of flesh and thud of bone, the mechanics and sound of heaving breath, the vibrations of knuckles rapping, fists drumming, feet juddering on the stage floor. Objects act as impediments to and extensions of the performers’ bodies, integral to their vocabularies as they toss hides and fabrics and barrel through a clattering colony of low stools. Anna Adams Stark enlivens the air with a long, fluttering cape-cum-scarf and a broad, diaphanous yellow shroud; Baldwin sweeps two cymbals in broad circles, clanging them together at their apex to swing through their ringing dissipation. The presence of these objects marks them even as they dance undraped and unburdened, their movements indelibly shaped by their material interfaces. As they cluster, disperse, and collide through the volatile textures of their environment, the exchanges among their bodies remain defiantly nonlinear, yet somehow fluent. A brief unison duet for Saúl Ulerio and Darrin Wright beams with formal and gestural clarities; it is through this casually studied rigor that their languid doodling and wild cavorting fall into sense.

Ruminations accrue, turning over and over, distorting and reshaping, departing and returning. A smattering of percussion sizzles from behind the crack in the loading bay door, which slides open to reveal the hazy silhouettes of musician and songwriter Ryan Tracy on electric guitar and smoldering vocals, and Bernice “Boom Boom” Brooks on drums. This interlude, played from behind a sheet of translucent plastic, serves as a tonal anchor from which new mysteries might unfold. The performers drift on stage as towering ghosts, concealed entirely behind their outstretched hides, howling softly as they spin to show themselves or collapse to enfold into these second skins. At turns graceful and grotesque, placid and menacing, they depart one by one, leaving Ulerio reclined in contemplation of his raised legs, outstretched and speaking in semaphore as darkness descends.

While Body Goes and Rumen could very well have carried evenings of their own, their succession offers a study in the myriad textures and possibilities of persistence. In these works, witnessing becomes a cathartic act, mediated through the performers and the images and sensations that echo in their wake. This intensity of shared presence summons the mode of persisting—that of courage—that true attention requires.