by Martha Sherman
In a clever twist on their already eclectic “Works & Process” series, the Guggenheim Museum offered a new slant on developing performance. In a “Costume and Dance” commission, designers Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung were invited to show their creative process, and brought snippets of their idiosyncratic costuming to a program of six dance works-in progress. The costumes themselves were the leads in this unusual performance. The result was a riot of glorious color and pattern, wildly different ideas and shapes that not only informed, but were as willing to dominate the movement as serve it.
Featured in several of the dance works here; both designers wear their own costumes beautifully. Bartelme is a dancer, ballet-trained and inclined, and a well-known fixture in contemporary work. Jung, not a trained dancer, turned out to be a marvelous mover. They have worked with large ballet companies as well as solo dancers, insisting – as they described in an amusing post-dance discussion with Isaac Mizrahi – on a high degree of independence in their design choices. In these works, certainly, that freedom has resulted in costumes that bring terrific life to the movement.
The opening scene was an apt preview. In dramatic light, Tiffany Abban (the vocalist whose songs provided much of the show’s score) slowly processed around the curved back aisle of the stage, festooned in a glamorous black gown, folded and draped around her with a long black train borne by her attendant, Patrick Gallagher. Abban took her place on the rounded stage wing, as Gallagher sat at the piano as her accompanist. In a quick twist, he covered himself in his own black costume made out of the train; the two were connected by the fabric as well as by their vocal and keyboard instruments.
The six dance fragments followed, each using the intriguing performance space in idiosyncratic ways. After Abban and Gallagher’s dramatic entrance, the first dances were just as site specific, using the curved aisles and ascending stairs for the performers’ entrances, as well as using the narrow crescent-shaped well in front of the stage. The dancers in Bartelme’s “This is White Dresses” were costumed in – surprise! – white diaphanous outfits, with hems of different levels and layers of translucent soft fabric quivering around the movers.
Following that first dance fragment, Pam Tanowitz’s “2 Duets” were costumed in colors and patterns that, we learned in the talkback, had “secrets and jokes built in.” The first patterns were inspired by the carpet at the Joyce Theater. In the second duet, Bartelme and Maggie Cloud wore simple A-line shifts decorated with photographs of “Old Times” – which had been their own earlier piece with Pam Tanowitz.
As well as being Jack Ferver’s long-time costumer, Bartelme has been a long-time dance partner and foil to the irrepressible, over-the-top Ferver. It is hard to steal a scene from the small boundlessly energetic performer, whose shtick demands that all attention be on him; and although he was clearly front and center (and sometimes levitated) in “Animal Queendom,” he let Bartelme and Reid’s costumes provide the clever (and attention-grabbing) central images. The most hilarious was the first: Ferver in a leotard with a large snake slithering up from the crotch, borne high by Russell Janzen and Burr Johnson, whose leotards were the trees, no doubt, of the original garden in which that snake slithered.
Some of the costume highlights of the rest of the program included the shimmering, paillette-encrusted costumes for Lar Lubovitch’s “Something About Night,” and the billowing fabric planes of colors worn in Burr Johnson’s “Tropopause.” The parade of creativity and craftsmanship through the evening was full of delights; this was “eye candy” of the highest quality.
Music has traditionally been offered pride of partnership with dance, and has often been as central to the art as movement (think Balanchine and Stravinsky; Cunningham and Cage.) Sometimes sets, too, have been given this pride of place, for designers with standing as serious artists (think Rauschenberg, Picasso.) Costumes, though, are rarely as central, or as privileged. Bartelme and Jung’s costumes, though, told 1000 tales.
Photos courtesy of Works & Process at the Guggenheim/Robert Altman:
Copyright ©2018 by Martha Sherman
Reid Bartelme and Harriet Jung with Jack Ferver, Burr Johnson, Lar Lubovich, Pam Tanowitz, and Gwen Welliver
Works & Process at the Guggenheim
New York, NY
March 26, 2018
Cover: Reid Bartelme, Russell Janzen, Jack Ferver, Burr Johnson, Harriet Jung, Tiffany Abban and Patrick Gallagher in Jack Ferver’s “Animal Queendom.” Photo © Robert Altman.
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