Today I saw the new experimental performance created by Brooklyn-based artist Noémie Lafrance, Home: The Body as Place. Lafrance is determined to give her audience new and fresh experiences, and has pursued this goal by creating dance for unusual sites, including in the ruins of a vast Robert Moses-era public pool in Brooklyn and on the soaring metallic curves of a Frank Gehry building at Bard College. Home takes the body itself as the site, making the experience far more intimate than those other pieces. But the long table around which the audience is seated and upon which most of the action takes place is itself absolutely protean, becoming at different times in this strange ritual a boardroom table, a banquet table, a dancer’s runway, and a funerary slab. Our hosts are antlered earth-mothers, Maré Hieronimus and the very pregnant Lafrance.
Lafrance is fearlessly experimental, and even if some of her vignettes may feel awkward or silly, it only makes us feel that these experiences are being offered to us in a spirit of generosity. Home is a participatory ritual. In breaking the barriers separating audience from performers, Lafrance aims to break down the barriers estranging us from the Earth that birthed and sustains us. I’ll refrain from describing the images and events as the piece will be best enjoyed if you have no idea what is coming next. Details and tickets here.
