Stephan Koplowitz: The Grand Step Project / various locales, NYC / June 15-28, with multiple performances on each date; for specific locations, dates, times, and travel directions, go to: http://www.dancinginthestreets.org/season/grand_step.html
Dancing in the Streets, which springs choreography from the prison of conventional theaters, celebrated its 20th anniversary by commissioning the site-specific specialist Stephan Koplowitz to tackle half a dozen celebrated New York City staircases. The result was The Grand Step Project, which I visited at the location most familiar (and dear) to me, the broad steps fronting the imposing Beaux-Arts façade of the New York Public Library at Fifth Avenue and 42nd Street–the Lion Library as it’s affectionately known, being guarded by the magisterially leonine marbles, Patience and Chastity. Overlooking Fifth and thus offering a fine view of the passing parade of life in midtown, these steps are often inhabited–at least in decent weather–by construction workers and office workers (chatting desultorily as they consume their brown bag or take-out lunches), students, lovers, tourists, and folks whose feet or spunk have simply given out en route.
The steps comprise a pair of long and wide, wide, wide flights separated by a generous flat plaza. The performance Koplowitz designed–15 minutes of choral music (on this occasion from the New York Choral Society, rendering feisty spirituals) followed by 15 minutes of dancing–gamely used the flat expanse for an empty zone between action and audience and confined the dancers to the upper flight, which is broken only by a single meager ledge.
The beginning of the dance was spectacular. Dozens of young people in summery street clothes spilled from behind the library entrance’s massive pillars, stretched out on the stairs as if lying in their beds or floating on a lake, and proceeded to roll down the steps until the whole staircase looked as if it had turned to roiling flesh.
The thing about a staircase, though, is that, once you’ve gone down, there’s no place to go but up, and so the dancers stood and did so, which was something of an anti-climax. Apart from a repeat of the lava-pouring-down-the-mountainside roll (compelling even the second time around), the balance of the dance consisted largely of the figures’ grouping and regrouping in formal clusters and making semaphoring sorts of gestures with their arms. Some contrast to this material was duly provided by the ensemble’s forming a human frame for a few soloists and occasionally coupling up for a little jiving, even a lindy-style lift or two, though there wasn’t much space on the stairs for letting go.
Given the circumstances–the staircase venue, the outdoor location (which invariably diminishes dramatic impact)–the massed-choir tactics were destined to work best. They would work even better, I think, if the arm gestures with which they’re embroidered had more full-bodied power behind them. As they’re performed now, the hieratic motions are made with limbs that look too fragile and fingers that seem too delicate to create sufficient impact. The same moves would register more eloquently if sprung from the gut, with visible energy and weight.
All in all, though, the performance was both ambitious and appealing. This sort of undertaking is a major organizational challenge, yet it was presented as the kind of thing that might just happen serendipitously in a big, crazy town where art counts and imagination flourishes. I–and, apparently, the crowd that gathered and stayed–found it compelling enough to overcome the distraction of the day’s weather (temperature in the nineties, humidity that made your palms stick together when you tried to applaud). Most important, its premises proved to have staying power.
The show over, I fled around the corner to the subway for a nice cool local train to the Upper West Side. As I went down the MTA staircase, it suddenly came alive for me. The steps here are slate gray, scored into a diamond pattern. Because of their composition, millions of displaced stars seem to twinkle from the dark matrix, defying the blobs of used chewing gum, the smoldering cigarette butts, and god knows what else New Yorkers cast away and crush with their relentless traveling feet. I was conscious of myself going down the steps, that utterly pedestrian function taking on the fascination of art. I reacted to the appearance of a lone climber-up (with her sienna skin and her flamboyant red dress, she took on the grandeur of a diva making an entrance in a gorgeously melodramatic opera). I registered the decreasing distance between us–until we passed each other and, as if by some infallible magic, the space between us began to stretch out again.
I thought about other steps, among them the infinite number I had climbed the day before with a patient but weary granddaughter in tow, when the escalator at the elevated 125th Street station on the Broadway line froze into staircase mode. “Climbing and climbing to reach the subway in the sky,” I said to encourage the four-year-old with the wondering gentian-blue eyes and the corn-silk hair curling into tendrils from the heat. Pale and slender, her bare legs labored to carry out the necessary task. “We’re climbing all this way up to catch the train, and the first thing it will do is take us underground. Isn’t that odd?” I asked the silent child, who allowed me a flicker of a smile and persisted in her arduous ascent–Heidi takes Manhattan.
I assume that creating a heightened awareness of the environment and ourselves as performers in it, is more or less Koplowitz’s intention.
© 2004 Tobi Tobias