Netta Yerushalmy – Dance Dance Demonstration, presented by the Wexner Center for the Arts with Los Angeles Performance Practice
Netta Yerushalmy’s Paramodernities, presented at the Wexner in 2019, was one of two or three things I still think about regularly. I’ve loved dance with the fierce ardor of a clumsy man – like watching a magic show – and a crazed metaphor addict for a couple of decades; the Wexner Center planted that seed with two shows: Savion Glover my senior year of High School and William Forsythe when I was in college.
Distant Dance Demonstration was a new work, filmed at the end of the summer in East River Park, choreographed by Netta Yerushalmy, and danced by Marc Crousillat, Stanley Gambucci, Nick Sciscione, Caitlin Scranton, Hsiao-Jou Tang, Babacar Top, and Symara Johnson. It was designed for the screen by Jeremy Jacob, with photographs by Maria Baranova, camera work by Alex Romania and Maira Duarte, and edited by Yerushalmy and Romania.
With this new piece, presented by the Wex and Los Angeles Performance Practice, Yerushalmy finds a way, with her steady crew of exquisite dancers, to not only make work in all of this but to thrive while acknowledging the hell of the pandemic and everything else going on with the world in a way that made me tear up even on a screen in my office. I can only imagine the crying I would have done if I’d been in the vicinity. It was hard not to have pangs of jealousy for the handful of assembled watchers we see in the margins.
Everything filmed from a remove kept entire bodies in focus and also nudged a reminder of the restrictions we were under – not too close, for the greater good; nevertheless, a lack, an absence. The title’s “demonstration” nodded to both the necessary and too-often-ignored-or-minimized Black Lives Matter protests and the demonstrations against the ill-advised profiteering plan to replace the beloved East River Park and its band shell for yet more ugly housing in a neighborhood so many of us loved.
The sumptuous filming uses a ‘70s-like patina of grain and discoloration and shifts from black and white to color with still photos as pop art punctuation, amplifying the drenched, saturated-in-history nature of these movements. They batter against the ugly history and dance with it, erupting with the joy of survival and connection in a way dance does better and more directly than any other form I can think of.
The framing by Yerushalmy had that deceptively easy, intoxicating manner of articulation that made interviewing her one of the great pleasures of my time writing about art. It’s an introduction that does what kept me coming back to the Wexner Center early, a handshake for challenging work that doesn’t strip away the mystery or undersell the joy and the pleasure of it.
I’m enormously thankful for the Wexner Center giving us this and profoundly regret I didn’t get to it sooner to tell more people and watch it four or five times.
Screen of Distance 