There’s an uncanny sight at the New Museum these days: a ghost in a machine.
But that’s not the only enigma there. Tucked behind the first-floor cafe in the south galleries space, five dancers perform sequences of refined, minimal movement.
They recite text about dozens of subjects, including a list of exotic animals and their prices — the last one, “slave, 1,200 Libyan dinar,” lands like a punch — and even softly sing an aria from “Madama Butterfly.”
This labyrinth of dance and words, called “Co-natural,” is the brainchild of Alexandra Pirici, an acclaimed Romanian choreographer and artist who is exploring the relationship between inanimate bodies and real ones.
For “Co-natural,” which runs through April 15 and is performed during museum hours, Pirici has turned the loftlike gallery space into a landscape that performers share with a hologram of another dancer — remember our ghost? — to showcase a disembodied presence. The performance-exhibition also considers how bodies are connected to symbols and images from history. There are visual references throughout to the black power salute of a fist in the air and to Confederate statues and monuments.
“I was very quickly caught by how she evokes history,” Helga Christoffersen, an assistant curator at New Museum, said of Pirici. “This is not just a choreographer who is sequencing a dynamic set of movements. She is thinking about evoking presence across time.” Christoffersen, who programmed “Co-natural,” noted that the museum has a continuing history of looking at how performance is seen in context with visual art.
Pirici fits the space. She is more than a visual artist creating performance work, but a choreographer creating art that considers history and the way bodies are affected over time. This may sound complicated, but “Co-natural” — with its steady, undulating pace and purposeful timing — is a visceral experience.
Pirici is a collagist, braiding together movement, collective memories and text to create a meditative whole. “Basically, I started thinking about the body and the self,” she said after a recent rehearsal at the museum. “Where does presence begin and where does it end?”
For Pirici, this question extends into all the traces we leave behind, from online profiles to selfies. Like it or not, she said, we are fragmented beings. “The notion of the individual that has total control and free will, it’s false,” she said. “There are all of these technologies about putting things in a box.”
Boxes, you get the feeling, aren’t really Pirici’s thing. She started as a ballet dancer, beginning her training in the fourth grade in her native Bucharest, Romania. Starting in the ninth grade, she attended the Vienna State Opera Ballet School on scholarship. It was, she said, a conservative country and her time there overlapped with the rise of the extreme right.
The school was also conservative, yet it made traditions outside of ballet available to its students, from contemporary dance and flamenco to jazz. “Slowly I just started to understand that I didn’t want to close my world and continue with classical ballet,” she said.
Pirici returned to Bucharest and eventually discovered the National Dance Center, an institution for contemporary dance and performance. She began showing work there and experimenting. “I was looking for ways to move out of this situation where people come and sit down and look at something,” she said.
In 2011, she began placing live bodies in relation to public monuments. This series of what she called “sculptural actions” featured minimal movement and gestures, and that method has seeped into “Co-natural” when the performers enact poses from sculptures, including those of Lenin, Christopher Columbus and Robert E. Lee.
In Bucharest, she began the actions as a form of protest. While the dance center was struggling from a lack of funding, she said, a bronze sculpture, costing around 2 million euros (or around $2.5 million), was being installed nearby.
“We would produce the sculpture with our bodies in front of the actual sculpture as a sort of ironic gesture,” she said. “A message that if this is the only art that gets funded — this solid, ossified, official art — then we can also produce a version of that, which is even cheaper and more flexible and on a human scale.”
There was also a political dimension. She said she was often asked when showing or discussing the monuments work in Romania: “'What happens if you leave these images alone? Maybe they’re harmless.’ But I don’t think they are. I think there is a subtle way in which these images and our visuals surrounding works on us and shapes us and transforms us.”
Because there was so much discussion and debate in Eastern Europe about the removal of monuments related to communism after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Pirici said, “When it started to happen in the U.S., I actually thought, wow that’s kind of late.”
Pirici doesn’t believe such monuments should be destroyed, but that instead they should be “recontextualized and placed somewhere else in a different setup,” she said. “This was also what I was doing with performers: OK, we leave this here, but what if I add someone on top of it? Or someone enacting a horse here? Maybe this changes what it signifies without having to tear it down.”
That idea of placing bodies next to objects comes into play in “Co-natural” with the hologram, a life-size image of the dancer Farid Fairuz. “It looks as if it’s in the space, but it’s a projection,” Pirici said. “But because it has no background, it feels as if it’s being displaced. It feels like a spirit.”
And there are advantages. “The biological body wants toilet breaks,” she said, “it gets tired, it decays.” A hologram, though, makes no demands.
In “Co-natural,” the hologram, shown throughout the day on one-hour loops, exists in relationship to the dancers, who perform for four hours at a time. (They do need bathroom breaks.) As the performance develops, dancers accumulate gradually and then disperse so that in the final hour only one remains.
The hologram “only exists in relation to the others,” she said. “You feel like he’s really here. It’s quite a big object. It shakes your mind.”
At times, the dancers also perform on a light-box platform that reminds Pirici of a laboratory table — she likes its science-fiction vibe. One aspect she highlights is choreography for the hands, which was inspired by the movement of factory workers.
In the end, Pirici is driven by the idea of exploring presence through connectivity.
“I’m not saying that live performance is coming to save us from the alienation of the image,” she said, with a laugh. “I’m trying to create an alliance. It’s about how live bodies and images influence and shape each other. You can reshape the images around you, and they will reshape you in turn.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Entertainment: When One Dancer Is a Ghost in the Room
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