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A Rare Collaboration, New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns Dances Amidst Diana Orving’s Sweeping Arcs

A Rare Collaboration, New York City Ballet’s Sara Mearns Dances Amidst Diana Orving’s Sweeping Arcs

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Sara Mearns and Jodi Melnick Carvalho Park
Sara Mearns and Jodi Melnick in rehearsal at CARVALHO PARK. Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.

A decidedly major draw for the launch of Carvalho Park’s Performance Series has been the inclusion of New York City Ballet principal dancer: Sara Mearns. A veteran achieving the rank of principal dancer over fifteen years ago Mearns’ charisma and personality are captivating aspects of her career at Lincoln Center. This principal’s reputational reach mixed with the gallery’s core of supporters, a crowd of more than one hundred from a wide range of communities and neighborhoods congregated for the biannual series of “cross-disciplinary and site-specific works” on July 11th.

Entering the newly renovated addition to the gallery, visitors are greeted by Diana Orving’s fiber art installation Spirit Playground. This Swedish artist’s installation which anchors the Performance Series is amoebic in its full yet amorphous form, fully present in its sweeping arcs and falls like a billow within these four walls. Unspoken boundaries unite Carvalho Park’s summer program, encircling Orving’s work and Stan van Steendam’s solo presentation THOROUGHFARE which is on view in the central gallery. Steendam’s abstract paintings emphasize perimeters of pastel terraced forms. Lips and ledges abound as distinct boundary lines delimiting planar space in the Belgian artist’s current series. Dappled fields of misty pastels express different temporalities of light while subtly winking to gestural energetics.

On the opening night, guests donned exquisite vintage treasures and rocked velvet blouses, and Doc Martens despite the stymying heat. Linen-clad ladies posed for portraits framed between sinuous portals of Orving’s installation. A healthy cohort of ballet students and professional dance colleagues came to provide their support. Even an ultra-luxury cohort arrived on Waterbury Street in pursuit of an intimate viewing of this NYCB prima. A rare occurrence as usually Mearns’ movements are tucked beyond the fourth wall of presentations of Balanchine’s structural repertoire or Robbin’s fantastical theatrics upon the company’s grand Lincoln Center stage.

The choreographer Jodi Melnick, who also danced in the piece, is a prolific and highly lauded member of the city’s contemporary dance ecosystem, receiving two Bessies for sustained achievements in dance by New York Dance and Performance Awards as well as a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012, the Doris Duke Impact Award in 2014, and the Jerome Robbins New Essential Works Grant for the 2010-11 season. Each is a remarkable achievement in the contemporary world at large in addition to the zenith of the contemporary dance world. Melnick aims to “create a landscape” as she works “sensorially, sensately, it comes from honing instincts.” Balancing different approaches, Melnick and Mearns have developed a lot of trust that allows them to continually compose the piece as they are performing, moving through to additional layers of nuance and connection. On this trip, Orving, Mearns, and Melnick successfully drew crowds of newcomers to the gallery during summer’s notoriously slow season.

Diana Orving. “Spirit Playground,” 2024. Site-specific textile installation at CARVALHO PARK. Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.

Entering through a passageway to greet Orving’s installation, upon first arrival it may seem impenetrable or bewildering. The quizzical nature of the work’s objecthood and a standing-room format beguile visitors, each uncertain of what form tonight’s engagement may take. With no singular vantage point allowing a complete view of the topography of the sculpture’s terrain, the viewer’s movement is an active agent in consuming the totality of the work. Orving’s sculpture contrasts the square glass bricks of the windows, the historic wooden beams spanning the ceiling in linear succession, and the concrete slab floor’s incised quadrant planes. Taking up residence the installation is in delicate dialogue with the rigors of gravity. Simultaneously both cloud and coral-like–with orifice apertures constricting or protruding–the work is robustly curvilinear. This multi-hemisphere meander additionally channels the dynamic character of the physical space. Orving completed the work’s variety of connections and interrelationships in person as a site-specific response, utilizing numerous modular sewn forms that the artist constructed in France as a preparative action responding to the quantitative requirements of floor plans and measurements. Only a singular wisp of fabric dares make contact with the floor, striking a note of theatricality while strictly demarcating the installation’s territorial realm.

Diana Orving
Diana Orving. “Spirit Playground,” 2024. Site-specific textile installation at CARVALHO PARK, New York. Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.
Diana Orving
Diana Orving installing “Spirit Playground.” Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.

The looming crowd circumscribes Spirit Playground’s perimeter acknowledging a healthy respect for its presence, often completing a curving path of only its exterior planes. Thereby tacitly agreeing that crossing its threshold must be a considered intention before puncturing its negative space to enter the installation’s interior realm. There is no entrance per se, yet various heights of its draping connective tissue create openings: each different, each a different risk calculation of whether to or not to, enter. Eventually engaging their curiosity, viewers duck dive beneath and between different openings in anticipation of the performance.

Jennifer Carvalho, the namesake gallery’s Partner and Director, appointed Cynthia Dragoni, founder of The Dance Lens podcast, as Creative Director for the Performance Series. Together they aptly fused the dynamics of dance into conversation with Orving’s sculptural practice. An autodidact designer, Orving ran a clothing label between 2000-2018, with its first full collection in 2007. Between the artist’s former ballet training and her technical expertise in textiles, the contrast of textures between loosely woven jute and a tighter gauge of fine woven linen, amongst other materials, activate vectors of movement along the form’s seemingly silken surface. Orving even denotes her handling of the materials, the chosen moment of tension, and the circuitous path of the installation as carefully choreographed choices. The subtlety of the work’s tonality even evokes a second skin, its covert transitions from transparent to nearly opaque, resembling nude tights–a balletic staple within the discipline’s costume repertoire.

sara mearns and jodi melnick
Sara Mearns and Jodi Melnick in rehearsal at CARVALHO PARK. Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.

Taking position, the two dancers remain independent ensconced in different cavities of space. With heavy breathing, it starts with the rise and fall of the breath. Despite breath being an originating measurement of synchronicity and duration within the field of dance, these are recorded and layered sonic landscapes. James Lo, the composer for this score, builds an admittedly highly narrative opening number filled with ambient sonic inclusions that give ever more details for performers and listeners alike to imagine their sources. As a bee buzzes and phone rings the audience exchanges sharp glances trying to locate where in the room these instrusions are arising, which fuses the realm of the score and living moment of bodies in motion in the space into a singular inseparable animate plane. Lo collaborated directly with choreographer Melnick during a residency to build out this soundscape which is their second project working together over the years. Melnick appreciates “his complex way of working” as his scores” are almost transportive to [her]. It is like having a whole other body in the space.” Throughout the week leading up to the inaugural performance, Melnick and Mearns in the studio solidified their creative dialogue with Orving’s installation, as well as pairing it with Lo’s original sonic repertoire in the day before their first performance.

Opening with steady repetitions of linear shuffling, the dancer’s legs track formulaically either forward, to the side, or back allowing the viewer to inhabit the breath enveloping the negative space. This slinky shuffling creates its gentle rhythm while being an indiscernible method of traversing the space. Subdued in scale and energy, these movements are played close to the chest, as it were. With hair down their arms simultaneously recount more familiar, yet mundane motions of holding one’s head in their hands or pulling one’s hair back into a structured ponytail. Laden with “hidden physical language in out gestures…There is a lot of getting ready, becoming who we are, there is an everydayness” in Melnick’s vision. Creating very human and personal vignettes of these bodies as individuals, as people with emotional struggles operating within a larger temporal system of pacing. As the breathing becomes more labored the languid movements evolve into a nearly ballroom-style pairing, each dancer becoming consistent echoes of each other’s personal space. More linear and structural arm gestures are synchronously timed with the sighs of exhalations. Once lulled into this interchange of bodies, forms, and breath a shattered glass and tight gasp abruptly punctuate the end of the first section.

The second section is minimalist–as it were–with more loose connections between the choreography and the score in part due to the sustained duration of these notes as long phrases. Defined by elongated relevés and larger expansive trajectories to finally explore the outer reaches, beyond the inner world, of Spirit Playground. Emerging into the audience’s foreground each dancer’s unbound energy releases movement echoing the curls and swirls of the installation’s orifices. Framed within its archways, dancers confront viewers while holding space in pockets of stillness. This second section of the sound score and choreography is as draping and arc-like as the seamed folds of the sculptural work and contrasts each exaggerated electronic chord that feels very linear in its harmonics. Wide swinging arms and looping leg motions push to off-kilter movements that are sweeping, grande, yet slightly zany. This refreshing shift amplifies the biological construction of Orving’s work in an abstract gestural vocabulary prioritizing the visual structure of each dancer’s form. Reaching up into the higher aerial realm of an oxygen-rich, cloud-filled sky, is in contrast to the earlier earthbound opening.

Amid falling notes in jumbles of shining scales, a piano and tickled guitar of a jazz syncopated improvisation bring the duo completely back down in full contact with the earth. Loosely fetal-curled bodies dance beneath the installation with sweeps of feet in unison, backs along the floor, and gently tilting bent knees coming together. This brings to mind the hollow delirium of a body lying still awake at night unable to succumb to sleep for this writer, though the choreographer prioritizes the viewer’s unique experience without prescribing specific meaning with her movement landscapes. The oddly quizzical score here contrasts the deeply human connection as our dancers finally come into physical contact with one another for the first time. Palms connecting, soles of feet touching, crescendo into full weight-bearing partnering. Gently subtle, yet the most human section of the performance, Melnick’s draped back is supported and gently lifted to the sky by Mearns to re-right itself, a poetic gesture laden with metaphorical resonance. A fading heartbeat signals the end of the performance bringing the elusive bodily components of the installation, the dance, and the score into a fully interdimensional experience.

Diana Orving
Diana Orving. “Spirit Playground,” 2024. Site-specific textile installation at CARVALHO PARK. Images courtesy of the artists and CARVALHO PARK, New York.

Melnick’s minimalistic costuming anticipates different depths of the installation’s opacity so the dancers can remain, as she explains, “visible through the transparency of Orving’s material.” The choreographer shared that at various moments both dancers “appear and disappear at different times, depending on where the viewer was in the space.” White linen cargo pants both adhere to current wide-leg pant trends as well as binding both dancers to the world within the cocooning textile structure. Jennifer Carvalho also noted the decision for neutral costumes foregrounds movement, form, and line. Thereby the intersection of performance and installation form an interdisciplinary site-specific staging in which score, choreography, and fiber art all amplify investigations of biological systems like bronchial respiration as movement of oxygen through confined spaces of the body.

A singular continuous form shaped by the creative impulses of its component elements in the space, Orving’s installation and the performance together perhaps abstract very human interrelationships within and between bodies, as well as the consequences of movement pathways becoming stagnant. Heightened by an inability to access the entire choreographic scope of the sculpture from a single view keeps it from being reduced to Instagram fodder, despite attempts to utilize its drama as a backdrop. Carvalho Park’s current program reflects conversations about boundary lines, and the poetic contradictions of airy sculpture, the mass of movement, and regimented paths that can be remapped by the subtleties of gesture. Se Yoon Park the gallery’s second namesake is an architect who draws upon his previous work with international powerhouses such as Rem Koolhaas’ OMA and Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG).

Even for those unable to attend the next performance on August 8th, the weightlessness of Spirit Playground as a sensory threshold can be detected by its slightly swaying form responsive to the gentle laps of air conditioning circulating within the space. Even a glimmer of light makes its soft touch known as an impression upon the surface, as the work is pulling inward to define its density–as in a cloud’s formation.

Sara Mearns and Jodi Melnick will perform next on August 8, 2024, at 7:00 pm at Carvalho Park, 112 Waterbury St, Brooklyn, NY 11206. RSVP to attend the free performance.

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