One of the great gifts an artist can give another is to inspire a work, and the reciprocal gesture (because art is fundamentally based in a gift economy) is to reawaken interest in someone whose work has been misunderstood, overlooked, or fallen out of fashion.
Catherine Cabeen’s Into the Void (at On the Boards through Saturday; tickets) doesn’t resurrect conceptual painter Yves Klein, who would have been 83 this year: It says “Thank you for your life’s work”–and “Bet you wish you’d thought of this.” It is sometimes joyful, sometimes embattled, frequently gorgeous, and always in pursuit of the elevating moment, the one you suspect might flash across your mind’s eye in a dark time.
Cabeen explains in her lengthy post “Why Yves Klein” something of what you see–her suited up as Klein, the costumes tinged with gold, the people painted blue, the dancer who wears a judo outfit, even a swing dance interlude–but one test of an artwork is the way it creates itself for you, and it’s possible to see Into the Void knowing very little about Klein, the new realists, or the critical appraisals of his work, and still be struck almost dumb by the display.
(Luckily, On the Boards is participating in Low Lives 3 and streaming the Catherine Cabeen and Company production live on April 29 from 5 to 9 p.m., and also filming it–in HD! with five cameras!–which result they will make available on their site later. See for yourself what all the rapture is about.)
Cabeen, who has danced with Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company and Martha Graham Dance Company, puts a lot into the hips in this work. “[I]n particular as a choreographer,” she writes, she was interested in “how the body can be used as an intersection for ideas,” contrasting her study of yoga with Klein’s Rosicrucian explorations of energy and matter. So here, for instance, you see sinuous hips and judo throws and falls. As Klein, Cabeen adopts, with glorious extensions, one-footed judo poses that evolve from forceful push to feline fall in a way that explodes the distinction.
She’s joined by dancers Germaul Barnes (in a floor-length, pleated, blue skirt) and Matthew Henley (in the judo outfit); and Karena Birk, Echo Gustafson, and Sarah Lustbader. Barnes has tremendous presence, an ability to dance while holding still, and dance floor moves (though, comically, he grabs his back at one point to show he’s human). These form a multitude of interactions with and without Cabeen/Klein; Henley’s brutish judo character challenges Cabeen, while Birk provides caresses and solace when Cabeen is thrown. I think this is Cabeen’s understanding of the way life’s energy feels personal, directed in aid of or against you.
The dancers also lift each other up, perch on shoulders, and the ensemble catches Cabeen and she leaps, again and again, into the “void”–the nothing that becomes something through the energies of art.
Throughout, a huge tri-panel backdrop displays close-up footage of the dancers and transmutes them into the purely visual realm, adding a digital layering to the scene in which Barnes and Lustbader, nude, paint themselves blue in a recapitulation of Klein’s Anthropométries. Tivon Rice’s projections constantly veer between an almost sculptural survey of the body and then break the images down in lava-lamp reds, showers of gold bytes.
Kane Mathis’s music is, if my memory serves, a through-composed evolutionary journey in itself, from trance-inducing guitar pickings to big band to electronic washes. The protean costumes from Michael Cepress, striking enough that they become the identification of the dancers, also can’t be pinned down to a style. The dancers step in and out of them, or reinterpret their use (a top becomes a short tunic, a train becomes a winding sheet and then a flower). Surprisingly, Susan Robb’s “Toobs” made an ominous, tentacular appearance. Connie Yun’s lighting travels an equally nuanced range, from effervescent golds to placid blue-toned whites.
It’s the sheer volume and variety of Cabeen’s points of contact with Klein’s life and works that sweep you away finally–there are bound to be moments that fall a little flat from person to person, but there’s no denying the depth of Cabeen’s engagement with Klein, and the beauty, ritual, and tenderness in this outpouring. Klein was one of those artists who would tell you that the painting was just what was left over after the moment of creation; as you watch Cabeen and her collaborators dematerializing the body and its adornments into light and motion, you understand exactly what he meant.
