I was once at a demonstration of a poetry-writing machine. The thing had been fed, or uploaded with, or otherwise given, the words that constituted the complete works of Joseph Conrad, if I remember correctly, and it had some grammatical logic programmed in, such that phrases stayed phrased and were handled correctly, as such. What it did, when it did its thing, was churn out poetry, surreal cut-and-paste stuff, using only those words from Conrad, thus, if I remember correctly, maybe offering some inadvertent postcolonial critique or something, along with proving that poets were now obsolete and machines could take over even the most extreme of avant-garde jobs, like the scissoring task work of reformatting a shelf of Joseph Conrad paperbacks into a few chance-tumbled, parlor game lines. The exquisite corpse of human literary production was exposed for all to see. The horror, the horror, etc.
The whole thing was asinine. As an experiment, stuttering in an attempt to grasp at the cybernetic potential of humanity, it wasn’t without interest, but at the same time this wasn’t remote sensing or a better artificial leg – this was poetry by numbers, by binary code, or, really, it was one bit of conceptual art with the legwork farmed out to a semi-thinking machine, like employing a series of fast abacuses to do your dirty studio work. The audience smiled, then nodded, then yawned, then went home, filching a jug of wine on the way out of the gallery (in my case, at least).
All this came chattering back, in the dreamily incomplete yet viscerally present manner of human memory, as I watched another machine show, a show where the human performers claim credit for the choreography but the computers set the rhythm for the dance. This work of memory points to the first weird thing in the show – Troika Ranch’s loopdiver – because while computers can certainly do things better than us, beating us at our own game, in, say, chess or higher mathematics, machines certainly don’t remember the way humans do. Yet one premise of loopdiver (or one interpretive frame for it, foisted upon the audience) is that the whole show deals with trauma, giving form, on stage, to the notion that, in human life, certain events brand themselves upon our brains and bodies. The moment of trauma loops, recurring and repeating, sublimating and substituting, haunting us, basically, in various psychic and physical ways.
Troika Ranch – the New York dance company known for their employ of technology – takes this notion of a looping traumatic memory (and the way such a memory drives a person) as the mechanized engine for choreography. Loopdiver’s starting point is a short video (five or six minutes) wherein dancers perform certain moves, moves which will be repeated, vigorously, spasmodically, to the unforgiving beat of a computer program’s re-playing of this footage, altered by a series of programmed loops. Five minutes of undulating in front of a camera becomes, then, fragments of said undulation projected onto three animated, Duchampian screens as, amid the harsh clatter and metronomic pulse of an electronic score. The human choreography, worked out in collective by the “ranch” of artists, is necessarily trapped, locked within the structure of loops, just as those loops have been imposed upon the video.
Yet the video, after all, is just a digital file, and can be manipulated any number of ways, bodies projected onto screens in pieces, blurred, fracturing into shatters. But the dancers are human dancer; they cannot measure up. The dancers dance as dance can, but they are incapable of matching their movements to the cold, mechanical score. Despite the shoddy allegory of traumatic memory imposed by the program notes, this is quite simply a show of human versus machine. This doesn’t merely feel anachronistic, it’s also ugly. Ugliness pervades the show, from the stripped set with its hand-cranked metal-framed screens, the six lonely, flailing dancers, the inexorable throb and blip of the music. Even the confrontational, two-sided audience set-up acts to prolong the visual violence, as does the dancers’ occasional entrance into said audience, grasping wireless microphones and whispering nihilistic tidbits in French and English. Or, at least, the stray intelligible fragments seemed nihilistic, in keeping with the performance as a whole. Dancers wearing themselves out trying to match an elaborately formatted impossibility, the weight of failure heavy in every step, and repeating, repeating, so that when the house lights finally come back up, the overwhelming sense is pure relief.
Humanity, in loopdiver, is neither valorized nor redeemed, and the audience is likely to walk away feeling similarly trapped in the throb and shudder of the bludgeoning show. So why, one has to ask, is Troika Ranch doing a thing like this? Why take a brief clip of human movement, feed it into a fancy machine, and construct a painfully boring, intellectually unsatisfying, and emotionally depressing performance in which six dancers torture themselves in polyester-heavy 70s costumes, running barefoot around a similarly bare stage, writhing and posing and replaying loop after loop after loop, stuck in an inescapable conundrum, expressing only their own inabilities for one long, long hour?
The gimmicky holds one answer, as co-director Mark Coniglio is, after all, the creator of the Isadora program, the system used to morph the original loopdiver clip into the prolonged monstrosity that plagues his performers. This program is of interest, and is used by, numerous theater and dance groups, and while one origin narrative presents Troika Ranch as a plucky cooperative of artists eager to push this tool into new applications, a more pessimistic reading sees the company and its touring performances as a sort of advertisement for this device. I suspect there’s a blend of both, and, indeed, the possibilities of this program are exciting and Troika Ranch remains at the forefront in terms of technological integration. Loopdiver, however, fails, and its dependence upon – its enslavement to, even – the computer is a major cause of this failure. The human dancers have become, in this show, mere cogs for the mindless manipulations of a machine. Their movements, their bodies, their breath – all these become as meaningless, in the final, computer-generate collage, as the words of Conrad became when blended into dial-a-poems by the earlier experiment, likewise dependent upon gimmickry at the expense of anything like human art.
Spencer Dew is the author of Songs of Insurgency (Vagabond, 2008) and numerous works worldwide.
Permanently archived: http://girlswithinsurance.com/index.php/reviews/147-0310-sd-diver & shortlinked: frsh.in/81.
