The performance starts before it begins.
A rug unfurled;
A stretch to prepare;
A folding chair opened to reveal the flat steel plane of its seat.
There are bells ringing in the audience.
Loneliness, as such, is a texture of one’s mind—the contours of the thoughts that we hold in relation to ourselves and others; the intangible manifestations of a universal experience that, despite intimate familiarity for many, largely remains ineffable. It is a sensation of oneness that threatens to consume, rather than complete.
Mamie Green’s Loneliness Triptych is a tender, subtly urgent, examination of this state—of the necessity, arguably the imperative, of creating external representations of internal landscapes. In three distinct scenes, the poetics of unitary anguish are coaxed from the bodies of six members of Volta Collective, the dance-theater company directed by Green, and the everyday objects that symbolize her vocabulary of despair and, eventually, concession to joy: an air mattress, a rug, and a rolling office chair transform into symbols of longing, alienation and connection—the loving doubles through which our most private expressions are mirrored, transmuted, and ultimately rediscovered.
Staged across multiple rooms of Jeffrey Deitch gallery in Los Angeles, Green’s choreography plays out within the theater of Alia Dahl’s curatorial vision—The Abstract Future, the exhibition on view at the time of the performance, positions 52 works documenting a new generation of artists redefining abstraction. By virtue of proximity, this assembly offers distinct points of activation to the dancers. In one exceptionally beautiful moment just before the start of Green’s piece, two dancers roll the infinite loops of protagonists Charlie and Bob—two bent aluminum floor sculptures by artist, and fellow dancer and choreographer, Madeline Hollander—out of the invisible frame, creating and demarcating the Triptych’s “stage.”
While the gallery’s inadvertent set pieces remain independent during the performance, they cannot help but relate to the movements unfolding within their thematic boundaries. Here, abstraction is a refuge—a state of being that promotes authenticity in an age where its capacity is rapidly diminishing. As we become increasingly comfortable with, and reliant on, the demonstration of ourselves in digital spaces, the value of our corporeal being—sincerity in anatomy and spirit—diminishes exponentially, losing ground to the pixels that we transmit to the world in order to be converted, broken down, reassembled, and perceived. We return to ourselves whole yet entirely separate—an isolation of the self to regard the self.
Within the first scene of Green’s Triptych, “The Doppelganger,” the title’s etymology itself referring to the apparition of a double, the audience is offered a manifestation of this condition as three dancers, Raven Scott, Bella Allen, and Anne Kim, articulate the triangulation between a woman, her inner turmoil, and the venue in which it is taking place: a movie theater. Anchored by the use of a small decorative rug and a generic metal folding chair, the forms of which are continuously engaged with and manipulated by the dancers, it is one of two scenes in the Triptych to utilize the spoken word. With text written by Stephanie Wambugu and Sammy Loren, the audience is guided by the narrative through the realm of cinematic fantasy to the eerie realization that, “Movies… we watch them, they watch us back.” At this moment, as performance itself becomes a character, we are asked to consider whether voyeurism is truly unidirectional.
As dancers move through sequencing that often focuses the body in extremity—deep back bends, knife-edge balances, pulled wingspans—Patrick Shiroishi, composer and live performer of the Triptych’s original score, drapes a sonic layer over Green’s choreography. Beginning with the bright peal of roped brass bells rung while moving through the assembled crowd, Shiroishi soon transitions to the bold tones of a lone saxophone that hurtles its notes into the gallery’s cavernous rooms. Occasionally, the folding chair, when brought into contact with hand or floor, resounds with a familiar echo.
As “The Doppelganger” ends, the audience follows the performance from Gallery 1 to Gallery 3 for the passage into scene two, “The Cam-girl,” where dancers Cacia LaCount and Bella Allen mount a sweeping investigation into the line between sexuality and “digital intimacy,” expanding the oxymoronic conversation of increased isolation in a hyperconnected world. Centered on the handling of a single air mattress, the dancers grasp at the possibility of connection repeatedly denied to them by the floating barrier of polyvinyl chloride (PVC). Traditionally associated with the pleasures of sleep, rest, or sex, the mattress becomes an alienating force, operating as a quasi-Walls of Jericho—something to be advanced upon and eventually torn down.
As LaCount and Allen continue their fraught pursuit of communion, Shiroishi’s score evolves its density, bridging saxophone with melodic extensions, both instrumental and vocal, from a series of pedals and mixers arranged at the foot of Primaries, secondaries and everyday script, a tapestry-like multimedia wall work by artist Loriel Beltrán. The dancers twist in and out of relation, at once embracing and rejecting one another in an effort to release themselves from the solitary confines of their perspectives—cam-girl and consumer. Midway through the scene, Allen begins to weave a monologue, written by Lily Lady, into her performance, arriving at a point where she begins a repetition of the phrase “In the zone,” its vaguely motivational tenor growing steadily unnerving with each utterance—louder in decibel and need until both are silenced by LaCount, who picks Allen up, slings her over their shoulder, and hastily lays her on the bed. Eventually, the mattress, fallible in its reliance on air, deflates into a wearable garment, shrouding LaCount’s body in various configurations until it is at last cast off and left discarded in a crumpled heap.
The audience, questing for Green’s final scene, “The Kid,” moves to Gallery 5, where dancers Ryan Ruiz and Ryley Polak collaborate in a transcendent effort to transform a rolling office chair into a playground of nostalgia and imagination. The chair, ostensibly a third figure in the sequence, emerges as both symbol and vehicle, conveying the dancers at alternating tranquil and breakneck speeds through their exploration of play—a space often forgotten, or rebuffed, in adulthood—augmenting Shiroishi’s score with the sustained roll of plastic wheels on polished concrete.
Punctuated by instances of dramatic inversion, positions of both precarity and heightened control, Green’s choreography expresses a childlike engagement with its physical surroundings and the fantastical extensions that the prepubescent mind feels compelled to create. As the scene progresses, the dancers, each gaining further access to their inner child, build an environment for adventure that stimulates without effort and frees without instruction, providing access to a dimension that counters the weight of even the most profound loneliness. Ruiz and Polak submit to every desire with abandon, poised in their shared view of the infinite—a gentle collision with the universe.
Leave a Reply