Correspondences with nature
HERE Arts re-imagines our collective theatrical experience post-shutdown
Walk through Manhattan’s Astor Place this weekend and you might bear witness to humanity’s battle with nature. Or is it nature’s battle with humanity?
HERE Arts Center is continuing a run of innovative post-shutdown theatrical work with Correspondences, a performance-based public art installation at Astor Place through Sunday. At set “activation periods,” members of the company LEIMAY are encased in transparent chambers and struggle against blasts of sand which push them down. The installation can also be viewed throughout the day, with or without performers.
Ximena Garnica and Shige Moriya created Correspondences in collaboration with the LEIMAY ensemble, a group of dancers and performers from across the globe. Garnica and Moriya are resident artists at HERE, which has proven among the most nimble arts organizations in shutdown times.
The theater’s #StillHERE series began online in March with artist talks, newly created digital work, and screenings of favorite past productions on Facebook. HERE’s digital work has reached over 180,000 people, according to artistic director Kristin Marting, and over 500 artists have gotten paid.
“When there are big issues I’m wrestling with, I look to art as a way to figure out how to examine and address them,” said Marting, reflecting on HERE’S quick pivot. #stillHERE was launched to “give artists an opportunity to voice their experiences in this incredible time - and also to get them paid.” At the same time, Marting encouraged HERE’s resident artists to think on possibilities for safe, socially-distanced outdoor work.
Cairns, written & narrated by Gelsey Bell, music by Bell & Joseph White (photo: White)
That ‘IRL’ work began with Gelsey Bell’s Cairns, a soundwalk through Green-Wood Cemetery created with Joseph White. A pre-created experience to be enjoyed at any time, alone or with others, Cairns proved a perfect way in. “It felt like a really beautiful emotional journey you were able to take - guided and embraced by an artist’s perspective,” said Marting. Next was Beast Visit by Normandy Sherwood, performed in a Bushwick garden for audiences of 13.
Correspondences is a far more ambitious undertaking. Finding an appropriate public space was a particular challenge - at one point, LEIMAY considered just renting a flatbed truck and “going around guerrilla style.” Marting argued for keeping it a static piece, with an audience able to “come through and around the work,” and set out to find a location. With assistance from the Mayor’s office, a permit was obtained last Friday, among the city’s first approvals for public performance since March.
LEIMAY has been working on Correspondences for three years but, in this moment, the piece felt like “a premonition” of an unstable time. “As humans we try to set structures to anchor us, so we feel safe and in control,” said Garnica. “These are questions we’ve always asked - about the tensions between the rhythm of our social structures, and the rhythm of the non-social.
“Sometimes when those tensions cannot be resolved, then there is a disharmony. And we’re living a lot of that disharmony right now. [So] it felt like the perfect time to share it with the city.”
Correspondences by LEIMAY (photo: Chole Bellemere)
All of LEIMAY’s work seeks to tie art in with the daily rituals of life, with an aim of correcting art’s detachment from its surrounding community. Garnica grants that it’s a “utopian” goal. It may also be fit for this moment. Limitations on art-making have forced theater into public spaces - parks, plazas etc. HERE’s work so far suggests potential in those limitations for bringing art directly into communities, connecting us in ways sitting down at a theater couldn’t always muster.
That is fortunate, since Marting has no plans to bring performers inside HERE until there is a vaccine or widespread rapid testing, and is ready to keep finding creative solutions until then. A combination of emergency grants, redirected funds from cancelled productions and use of New York’s shared work program has kept all of HERE’s staff on payroll. Marting has budget plans for March, June or September re-openings.
Meanwhile pieces like Correspondences could push us to not only stay connected, but imagine new ways forward. The piece is “an act of grieving through poetry,” said Garnica - but that shared grief “creates an even deeper connection with questions of being and interconnection. It allows us to keep imaging different spaces, to listen, and to learn how to care better.”