gallery crawl I

Many of the people I saw at the new MoMa (pictured) looked awfully smug. Not just the staff, but some of the patrons. Stereotypical New York art-world, young and beautiful, stylish and full of themselves. But at Participant, a tiny gallery in the Lower East Side, the staff was friendly and nice and actually smiled when they spoke to me.

I saw a write-up of Julie Tolentino's "For you" in both art (Time Out) and dance (Village Voice) listings. It was a one-woman show for an audience of one. And it was free. I made a phone reservation and showed up at the gallery a few minutes early. (On the way, I took a picture of mannequin heads posted on stakes; the elderly woman minding the store scowled at me.)

The doorway opens to a landing that gives a partial view of the gallery's upper and lower levels. The performance space is above, in an open room set off by a curtain of clear vinyl strips. I waited below. For the end of the piece, you can choose what song you want her to interpret. The list included indie rock, some Lou Reed, some Joni Mitchell, some vintage soul music. I picked a Cowboy Junkies cover of Neil Young's "Powderfinger."

When my turn came, a cat-eyed gallery grrl with a nice smile led me up to the performance space. It was a white room, maybe 20x10x10. Video was projected at the far right corner of the room, with images and occasional text ("Welcome," first).

The dancer wore pajamas and lay in a bed at the near end of the room. I was seated at her bedside, just inches away from her. Music plays, a mix of menacing electronic sounds. She doesn't see her patron at first - for the first few minutes I sat and watched her toss and turn, her eyes closed.

It felt like a hospital. One reviewer wrote that the client-performance set-up suggested prostitution. Either way, there is an intimacy and a distance. She doesn't entirely dance *for* you, but in such close quarters - much of the time she dances in arms's reach - there must be some level of interaction, if only in her reaction to whoever she finds sitting in front of her when her eyes open.

She gets out of bed, looking very tired. She sleepwalks to the other end of the room and is distressed by the projected images of headlights coming down a dark highway. These dream images are of open space and night, but she's trapped in her white room. She paces between the right and left walls of the room, pushing herself off each side. Then the video projects a text instruction for me to move to a chair along the left wall. She's awake, and approaches me - somewhere along this point, she sees me for the first time, but our eyes meet only briefly, and hers don't appear to react. For the last segment of the piece she took me by the hand to a folding chair on the right side of the room. The original music had ended, and she hit a CD player next to me to play my request. She performed her interpretation, walking towards and away from me and collapsing at one point into a fetal position at my feet.

I'm not sure what I think of the piece - I wasn't sure how to react, really - but I am still thinking about it.

(Dear reader, feel free to mentally edit the wandering verb tenses in this post.)