Duped!

Beth Gill experiments with transcendent body doubles.

Time Out New York
By Gia Kourlas
PUBLISHED: Nov 28, 2007

Beth Gill began her meticulous new quartet, Eleanor & Eleanor, by carefully considering the space it would inhabit: the cavernous, boxy stage of Dance Theater Workshop, where, as she noted after a recent rehearsal, the pitched angle of the audience to the stage theatricalizes everything—like it or not. “I don’t think choreographers want the bodies of their dancers to become so objectified, but they just naturally do because of the dimensions,” she says. “I wanted to build something that not only accepted that, but maybe used it as a mechanism. I started to let myself fantasize about dealing with the bodies in space with more abstraction then I’ve ever dealt with before in my work.”

Part of a shared program with choreographer Daniel Linehan’s new solo, Not About Everything, Eleanor & Eleanor began with Gill’s idea to build a diptych by creating two pieces alongside each other. “But it became less about a diptych and more about wanting duplication,” she explains. “I became fascinated by the idea of putting two bodies into unison. That’s where the title came from: I originally saw Eleanor Hullihan and Eleanor Bauer doing a unison, which started to get me to think about that very simple structure. It’s about them as fictionalized or real bodies in a space; that initial thinking set up a commitment to having the structure guide the shape of this piece.”

Bauer isn’t in the dance, but Hullihan is, along with Julie Alexander, Danielle Goldman and Kayvon Pourazar. While Gill, a graduate of NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts, hasn’t produced a tremendous amount of work yet, what she has shown (Marginal Strip and wounded giant at Danspace Project and the Kitchen, respectively) identified a choreographic voice both rigorous and astute. Her experiments with space and time are even a bit mind-altering. There’s a stillness that crystallizes negative space and deceptively simple movements that, in turn, pulsate voluminously; both are framed within Gill’s impeccable structure.

Eleanor & Eleanor, which includes sound by Jon Moniaci, lighting by Joe Levasseur and design by Jeff Larson, opens the shared program—Gill requested to go first because, as she puts it, “I feel like this work needs to start with a controlled space.” Part of the piece is about honoring movement (there is a trio that serves as a comment on the lack of actual dancing in current contemporary choreography); it also hones in on a specific performance quality Gill is after. “The dancers are trying to abstract themselves in the space—I’m not even sure if I understand, at times, what that means,” Gill says. “We don’t want to disengage from what we’re doing, but we also don’t want to overengage. We’re trying to really be present—I think that word is used a lot, but it’s a complicated place to be. The agenda is to allow the composition of the dance to come to the forefront; the individual drops back.”

Still, there are moments, especially in Hullihan’s case, when the dancer transforms into Gill’s idea of a fictional body before your eyes; the choreographer describes it as “a strange kind of separation between the brain and the body.” In one moment, when Hullihan stands downstage, her body slowly shrinking toward the floor, it is not the collapse you notice, but the haunting way in which blood seems to drain from her face, rendering her skin waxy. It’s a bit like gazing at a portrait long enough to feel as though you’ve entered it.

“We worked to take the energy out of her form, out of her figure, out of her body, though energy is not the right word exactly,” Gill explains. “When she starts that series, I perceive her as being almost hyperengaged inside of a performance, and I worked with her to become gradually disengaged. We talked about this literally in terms of the eyes. You know the way that the eye can become dull? Like it stops having a sparkle or a glisten? It’s really weird, but she can do it, and I’m amazed by it.”