Kristin Clotfelter/Studio C Projects: On You
Friday, Mar. 8–Saturday, Mar. 23, 7 p.m. Fri./5 p.m. Sat., $10–$20
Monkey Bottom Collaborative, Durham
Taxonomy, known values, baselines, experiments: The terms are all part of a discourse associated more with science than the arts. Yet choreographer and performer Kristin Clotfelter and lighting and environmental designer James Clotfelter discuss On You, their first full-length dance work in the area, with a precise nomenclature that evokes lab coats instead of leotards.
“Scientific practices are almost [dance] scores in themselves: the way you set up an experiment as a series of steps, look at the outcome, and then try it again until you have all these outcomes that you can compare with one another,” Kristin says. James says that an experimental model seemed the best way to “capture what we’re interested in and organize our research in a way that can be analyzed and referenced.”
“So we can actually learn something,” Kristin adds, with a grin.
The approach differs from the couple’s three brief forays into regional dance after moving here less than two years ago. In New York, Kristin had an active career as a dancer with the Metropolitan Opera and Susan Marshall and Company; she played Lady Macduff in Punchdrunk’s immersive theater work Sleep No More. Meanwhile, James was creating lighting design for a broad range of companies, including Pig Iron Theater and Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater, and designing environmentally sustainable “off-the-grid” lighting and power systems for live performance.
But after the birth of their daughter in 2015, the couple needed an environment more personally sustainable than a fourth-floor walkup adjacent to the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway. A friend suggested they check out the dance scene in Durham. A visit during a Durham Independent Dance Artists event prompted a second visit. The couple moved here and began making inroads within weeks of their arrival.
First, an improvised performance found Kristin fluidly partnering with (and occasionally dodging) a light fixture rotating on an aerial wooden rod in one of Justin Tornow’s PROMPTS events at The Carrack. Verses, Kristin’s pensive solo work in Tobacco Road Dance Productions’ 2018 showcase, asked what parts of a rural family’s legacy could be preserved, set against an instrumental and spoken-word ethnography by North Carolina composer Caroline Shaw. Then, in Tornow’s 2018 production, SHOW, Kristin haunted the basement of The Fruit with two colleagues as James’s lighting design altered the landscapes and relationships in Two.
Over the last six months, you could say the couple has been rehearsing with musician Charles Chace and performers Pin-Han Lin and Matthew Young. But in the artists’ view, they’ve been carefully setting up an experimental protocol instead: a framework in which a carefully formulated set of research questions can be repeatedly posed during the production’s three-week run in the DIDA season. If the company has set up the experiment well, the biggest variable will be the title character: you, the audience.
“As a performer, I’m incredibly interested in choice-making, and doing that live, in response to other people who are making choices in the room,” Kristin notes. “I want audiences to have the same opportunity. There has to be some equitable exchange, where an audience member can have at least a part of the agency I have and the joy that I get from making those choices in front of people.”
Audience participation is often mocked for its awkwardness, its lack of spontaneity and grace. But Kristin and James believe that, under the right conditions, it can be nurtured and developed as an organic part of a shared artistic experience.
“We’re interested in deconstructing and disabling a lot of the assumptions and baggage we usually bring into a theater,” James says. “When you break those assumptions down, there’s no telling what all of our roles might be.”
But both are quick to reassure us that no one will be pressured to participate in any way that makes them uncomfortable.
“The tools we bring in as designers create the conditions in which response is possible, but they can’t create the responses themselves,” Kristin says. Much of the exchange between the viewers and performance will come out of content the performers derive “from the physicality we see among the bodies that are observing us,” James says. “We can glean so much just by seeing them in the space.”
Affording audience members agency they’re normally denied also involves permitting them to respond to one another, and at points, they may be invited to participate more directly. These potentially liberating strategies serve fundamental research questions: How do performers and audiences create the meaning of an artwork, and how might that value change if the relationships between the two change.
Instead of asking the audience to think or watch in a certain way, James says On You “asks you to listen to how you think or watch.” The goal is to answer a question Kristin poses: “If we can discern the kind of value that can exist in the space we inhabit together, can we take that value with us and let it inform our other value structures or the other places we seek meaning?”
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