What is it about a group of women? Together, the 10 performers in Heather Kravas’s The Green Surround, at P.S. 122 as part of its COIL festival, are not Furies or Bacchae, beauty contestants or competitors on “The Bachelor.” They’re also not nuns, or school girls in straight lines, or a corps de ballet, or a chorus line, though much of the piece involves their striving for synchronicity.
They are clearly feminized, though not aggressively so. When we enter the compact theater on the ground floor, around the side from the building’s main entrance, they are leaning against the wall wearing Jackie O. sunglasses, red lips, neat head scarves, and prim white wraparound dresses with full skirts—like aspiring starlets all waiting for their moment as extras in the big swooning hospital scene. They do not smile.
Other than their costumes—aside from one solo turn, identical—and possibly some sensual swiveling of their hips (though my male hip-hop instructor is very good at that), there is nothing gendered about the movements these women perform in The Green Surround, or the words they utter for that matter. And yet it’s hard to imagine this piece being performed instead by a group of 10 men. It’s as if all that testosterone would somehow dissolve the dance’s structure, which relies on these women being themselves—part of the visual enjoyment of the piece is taking in their physical differences, all the more obvious when they are dressed alike—and being one entity at the same time.
A central part of their experience of the piece, and ours, is that they are together even when they’re not. When the piece begins, after taking off scarves and shades, revealing faces and hair—curly, straight, long, short, red, brown, blonde (though mainly brown)—they line up in a cluster slightly off center stage, facing at an angle so as not to be looking straight at the audience. They all begin repeating the words “boot licker” in quick succession, ticking off each utterance on their fingers, tilting their heads to look from one hand to another as they keep count. When they get to 10, they all change, and begin saying “Lick boots” (at least that’s what it sounded like to me). Then it’s back to “Boot licker,” and then “Lick boots,” over and over, faster and faster, until it breaks down and becomes a pleasant babbling murmur, like those schoolgirls just getting out of class.
The performers give this exercise their all; they strive, but not aggressively; they concentrate, but not ferociously, to the point where their brows become knit. Everything they do throughout the dance has a focused calm, a serious, workmanlike quality. This is true when, perhaps in a reference to men, for whom this sort of thing is routine (okay, maybe not on stage), some of them relieve themselves in public, against the back wall of the theater. (They all press their backs into the wall and bend their legs, assuming a seated position but with no chair, as opposed to peeing toward the wall like men generally do.) Not all of the women urinate. Performance anxiety? Later we are treated to some drooling, which everyone seems to manage just fine.
Before this, the dance does overtly conjure a ballet class, with all the women against the back wall, moving in unison and incrementally, so slowly at times we almost can’t see their progress. They rotate to face one way and then another; their feet at one point assume fifth position (or maybe third); their arms curve gracefully in an excruciating port de bras. By this time they are all wearing identical black leotards and white socks. It’s a pretty scene. The relaxed formalism of all the shapes and groupings Kravas employs allow us to take in the simple beauty of bodies on stage.
Often the movements, like the spoken phrases of the opening, break down, evolve, and devolve over time. As the women stand on stage, torsos and arms plunging toward thighs and then back up again, the tone of the movements meanders subtly from sawing to flailing to soaring. The emphasis slowly shifts from the downward movement to the upward. The women’s movements shift along with those closest to them, and the group—while nominally executing the same movement—diverges slightly. It’s like watching the dips and eddies of birds flying in formation.
After a more elaborate sequence with a tiny dictator known as a metronome and bells of the kind that used to be found on hotel reception desks, in which the performers, on hands and knees, fling hair and arch spines in an approximation of the yoga exercise known as “Cat and Cow,” we get the evening’s only solo. All but one of the performers file out en masse, counting aloud (we can hear their voices throughout). The one who stays behind is wearing different shoes than the others—black combat-ish boots as opposed to brown clogs (the trendy and obscenely expensive shoemaker Hasbeens is a sponsor). In her moment of liberation, she proceeds to attempt to put her boots, and her feet along with them, through the floor of the stage while moving back and forth across the space in a kind of walk-stomp-kick. She does not come off as angry, just intensely purposeful. We hope she has a good orthopedist.
The piece ends with the performers up close to the audience, facing us. Here they simply speak in unison, sticking to a form, turning words on their heads or sometimes their sides, offering up options in the process. Some phrases are clear cut: “Instead of ‘beauty queen,’ say ‘black sheep.’” Others are less so: “Instead of ‘almost there,’ say ‘scantily clad.’” “Instead of ‘lost,’ say ‘ready-made.’” And the last: “Instead of ‘over,’ say ‘over and over,’” a great aphorism as well as a helpful summary of the dance we’ve just seen, with its multiplying repetitions.
The title is a mystery. Could it have anything to do with “The Green Table,” German choreographer Kurt Jooss’s 1932 meditation on war, with a death figure who also does some stomping (I admit this was my parents’ suggestion). Tables are flat, all the better to stare across when negotiating with an enemy, or to lay out your losses. The word “surround” has no particular shape; it all depends on the company it keeps.
The Green Surround
Cocept by Heather Kravas
ran January 7 - 9 as a part of the 2012 COIL Festival
for more info: http://www.ps122.org/performances/the_green_surround_coil.html
Olivia Jane Smith is a writer, editor, and lifelong theater lover (her parents borrowed her name from "Twelfth Night"). She has written about theater for the New York Daily News, Backstage, and the Gambit Weekly in New Orleans, Louisiana. Follow Olivia at ojanesmith.tumblr.com
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