We Build Excitement (2014)

Role: Choreographer. Description: 20 minute site-specific choreographic loop for 14 performers commissioned by SPACE Gallery to respond to Jesse Sugarman’s video eponymous installation. Performed on the opening night of the video installation. SPACE Gallery. Portland, Maine. October 3, 2014. Note: A proscenium version was performed in November, 2014 by Bates students in the 2014 Bates Fall Dance Concert.

Quick links (also embedded in project narrative): 5 minute performance excerpts; 21 minute full performance loop

Project Narrative

In the spring of 2014, I was invited by SPACE Gallery curator Nat May to collaborate with California-based video artist Jesse Sugarmann. Sugarmann’s three-channel installation We Build Excitement had toured nationally was the featured work in SPACE Gallery from October 3-December 5, 2014. I created a site-specific choreography for fourteen dancers (a mix of students and professionals) for the opening of the installation. SPACE Gallery, a music, visual art, and social justice gathering venue, is at the heart of Portland, Maine’s experimental arts scene. A mobile audience of approximately 1,000 audience members viewed the 21 minute looping performance over the course of three hours on October 3, 2014.

Featuring video of laid-off auto assembly line workers re-enacting their jobs and car accident survivors reenacting their crashes, the funny and poignant video installation We Build Excitement explores “our fraught, intimate relationships to cars” (Sugarmann). A third video documents the creation of giant kinetic sculptures made by crashing, piling, and spatially juxtaposing cars. A powerful subtext each of the three videos is the death of the American car industry. Most of the cars in the video were made by now-defunct automaker Pontiac, and the some of workers re-enacting their jobs stand on a wide brown field—the site of a demolished Pontiac factory. Sugarmann jokingly claims to be the “only one who noticed” when GM disbanded Pontiac in 2009, but his videos stand as a testament to the impact of the business on many aspects of American life. I was impressed by the way that Sugarmann juxtaposed wide video shots to respectfully and playfully allow the subjects’ relationships with cars to unfold in varied and non-linear ways. Click here for a short video focusing on Sugarmann’s project.

In my choreography, I sought to maintain Sugarmann’s light and respectful approach—both for the subjects of the video and for the video as artwork. The dancers and I explored formal, kinetic, and emotional themes suggested by the content of the video and the spatial design of the installation. We approached the three videos from multiple creative angles, creating choreographic snippets or vignettes that moved between the three video screens. The choreography also moved the audience around the space.

2013SpaceFloorplan_sugarmannopening-boggia — Spatial plan for audience (white space) and performer (blue space) movement around SPACE gallery. Dancers moved Pontiac pennants to define the performing space. Click image for a bigger view.

The structure of the choreography was determined by the relationship between the three videos looping videos, which I approached like a musical score.

Score for “We Build Excitement”. Time goes from left to right, with each column being a minute. Top rows are notes for video events, bottom rows are instructions for individual dancers. Click image for a bigger view.

The choreographic approaches inspired by the content of the video included re-enactments of the video, snippets of partnering that embodied the matter-of-fact violence of the car crashes, and duets and solos developed from worst case scenario prompts, in which I asked dancers to act out the worst mistake that could happen at every given moment of a short set duet.

Spatially, I focused on continuously shifting the foreground/background relationship between the live dancers and the video content. The cast consisted of four professional New-England-based dancers and ten Bates college students. The professional dancers combined choreographed material with improvisational scores based on shifting foreground and background.

This video juxtaposes two successive versions of the performance. Both wide and steadycam shots of two loops of the 21 minute performance are shown simultaneously in an attempt to capture the complexity of the event, which consisted of simultaneous performances in separate corners of the space.

Later in the fall, the students and I adapted their portion of “We Build Excitement” for the stage. This was a major adaptation, since the material was developed for a non-proscenium space. The adaptation utilized the lobby of the theater and moved onto the stage. Two mobile projectors allowed us to further explore the formal relationship between projection and the human body.

Details

Video Installation: Jesse Sugarmann

Choreography: Rachel Boggia with the performers

Performance commissioned by SPACE Gallery, Portland ME for the opening night of WE BULD EXCITEMENT, a 3 channel video installation by Jesse Sugarmann(Oct 3-Dec. 5, 2014)

Professional performers: Shawn Hove Annie Kloppenberg Betsy Miller Meredith Lyons

Bates College Students Performers: Mary Anne Bodnar ‘16 Keila Ching ‘18 Mallory Cohen ‘17 Tomisha Edwards ‘15 Sofia Elbadawi ‘18 Talia Mason ‘15 Claire McGlave ‘15 Hannah Otten ‘16 Laura Pietropaoli ‘17 Sarah Wainshal ‘17

Lighting and Stage Management: Guenevere Figueroa ’15 with Shawn Hove

Performance Documentation Steadycam: Robert Little

Performance Documentation Editing: Rachel Boggia

Thanks:

Nat May

Justin Moriarty

Hannah Miller

Carol Dilley

Bates College Department of Theater and Dance

For more information:

JesseSugarmann.com

RachelBoggia.com

SPACE538.org