In the past few years, the multidisciplinary design collective Harrison Atelier, led by Seth and Ariane Harrison, has taken on some fascinating themes—technology’s effects on human longevity, in “Anchises” (2010); the pharmaceutical-industrial complex, in “Pharmacophore” (2011)—and dance has played an integral part. The group’s latest project, “VEAL,” addressed the ecology of the industrial animal, and incorporated dance in a luminous way that was unexpected in a work of such dark and disturbing content.
“VEAL,” a combination of sculptural installation, music, and dance, was shown recently at the Invisible Dog Art Center, in Carroll Gardens. The installation was on view for several hours during the day, followed by an evening performance of the music and the dance. Before the performance, the audience could walk among the sculptural elements: three tall open metal racks with taut strings connecting top and bottom, and glazed white ceramic disks, like misshapen doughnuts, attached to the strings; a cluster of twelve bulbous white creatures, which looked like large inflated stomachs, or pigs, with four legs and an odd flap-covered opening where the head should be; a three-sided fabric booth; and a video that took up the rear wall, in which the disk shape and abstract objects flowed down in a constant stream before a pea-green background. The music and the dance occurred simultaneously, in separate rooms; visitors received either a white or a black ticket, indicating whether they would see the music or the dance first. After twenty-five minutes, the audiences traded places to see the other performance.
Just before the show started, half the group was led—in the context of “VEAL,” it seemed more like being herded—into a rear room, an L-shaped space interrupted by a few steel beams. As the audience settled in a single-file line hugging the walls, three dancers—Silas Riener (the choreographer), Rashaun Mitchell, and Cori Kresge—loped around the room. Each wore a costume made of pale-yellow latex; yellow-and-green fake fur accented Riener’s neck and Mitchell’s ankles, as well as a panel on Kresge’s back. Each costume had a bib or front of some kind, behind which the dancers hid their hands as they ran, high up on their chests, giving them a distinctly animalistic quality. An abstract score came and went, and faint singing spilled over from the music performance happening on the other side of the wall. The room was dim, lit by a sculptural element on the ceiling, comprising a few dozen rectangles filled with short segments of clear tubing, through which changing colored lights shone. As the dancers ran, seemingly without pattern, their eyes darted, always watchful.
One of Harrison Atelier’s inspirations for “VEAL” was the book “Every Twelve Seconds: Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight,” by the political scientist Timothy Pachirat, a sobering account of the five months that Pachirat spent working undercover in a Midwestern cattle slaughterhouse, in which he witnessed, and participated in, mass killing. (One animal was killed every twelve seconds.) Much of Riener’s choreography seemed based in this chilling world, but never in an overt way. Even in the opening, the dancers didn’t embody animals; but they never seemed human, either. A passage in which the three roamed around the space with their torsos bent far forward and their legs swooping through the air made them seem otherworldly. At another point, Riener ran in tight circles, slipping, out of control, which brought to mind images of livestock scrambling pitifully on the slick, slimy floors of industrial farms. Though packed in with thousands of other animals, the beasts in so-called C.A.F.O.s (concentrated animal feeding operations) are ultimately alone, and their fear can be read in their jittery movements and their wide eyes. Here, the dancers evinced no panic, although each seemed to exist in an abandoned state, without recourse to comfort. They almost never touched. Even when Kresge walked while Mitchell and Riener slowly tumbled alongside her, and her hands brushed against theirs, there was no attempt to grasp, or caress. In moments of more frenetic movement—Riener bouncing high on straight legs; Kresge frenetically jumping up and down, hitting her legs with her hands—the dancers’ faces were placid, without worry or emotion, perhaps a reminder that we don’t know how animals feel even, or especially, when we’re engineering their institutional death.
Aside from the boxes of light, the only other design elements in the room were strips of thick clear plastic, about eight inches wide, such as one might see at the entrance to a meat locker. One piece ran along the floor, up one of the beams and down the other side, and across to the opposite wall; another hung looped from the ceiling, and at one point Riener draped himself over it and used his feet to push himself off one of the beams repeatedly. This movement looked carefree at first but became more painful to watch the longer it went on, as the plastic dug into Riener’s belly. He was impassive, though, and Mitchell and Kresge exhibited no interest in his condition. Later, Riener left the room, and the other two carried on in his absence, in subtly calibrated movements in which the body shifted off center, a leg lifting off the ground. It was as though they were constantly monitoring their environment in minute gradations, alert for danger. The threat they sensed was unclear, but all you had to do was look around: we surrounded them.
When Riener returned, he arranged himself upside down in a cradle that had been formed by two strips of plastic tied together, his bib now obscuring his face. He arrived in a kind of yoga pose, his legs in a diamond shape, his arms hanging, a benign and restful posture in the context of the odd, somewhat sinister goings on. Kresge and Mitchell exited, and Riener hung there for several minutes, his stillness growing more unsettling. A guide indicated that it was time for the audience to file out, and as people passed Riener a few shuddered. His body had gone from living thing to inert object—a side of beef, suspended from a hook.
We poured into the other room, and the other half of the audience replaced us in the dance space. Before long, Loren Dempster’s music, which we had heard in the background of Riener’s dance, rose up around us. A few musicians played the stringed racks with bows and sticks, the ceramic disks muting the resonance; two men stood by the white piglike sculptures (made of milled foam, sanded and painted) and created sound by forcing air from a bag or bellows through a tube and into a chanter placed in the creature’s “mouth.” A soprano and a countertenor moved around the space singing hypnotic chants with lyrics by Seth Harrison: a “Lyre Aria,” set among the strings, alternated with a bagpiped “Sty Aria”; in the fabric enclosure, the duo sang a “Posthuman Hymn,” and, standing before the video, a “White Noise Aria,” whose stream of words (“cellophane textiles cosmetics wallpaper detergent …”) reflected the cascading images behind them. A conductor, Joshua Kohl, stood on a platform and led the proceedings; he and all of the musicians wore black butcher’s aprons. As the songs progressed, the lyrics told, poetically, a story of the role of humans in animals’ lives, the merciless reshaping of their existence to fit our own.
In the middle of this, Riener emerged from the other room and danced before the video wall—so this was where he’d gone when he left us before. He eyed us warily, sizing us up as predators or competitors. Standing before the video, he moved slowly, with one leg planted and the other gesturing around him; there was elegance, but also strain, as the standing leg bore the burden of support for a long time before Riener switched legs. Then, over and over, he jumped up, flailing his arms and legs, in an action that could be read as ecstatic but here—before the video, with its relentless rain of objects, the myriad products made from animals, perhaps—seemed only despairing. Eventually, Riener left the same way he’d come on: tentative, suspicious. Betrayed.
Such ominous intimations ran throughout “VEAL.” To be sure, it was a sombre work, a condemnation. One hears “veal” and, more often than not, thinks of dumb, frightened cattle penned in and raised only to be destroyed. This work made one think about how we use, and misuse, animals, but, with its spell-binding music, carefully crafted visual elements, and arresting movement, it was also an example of what’s possible when artists collaborate on something meaningful to them—making art in this way is how Harrison Atelier responds to the world. When Riener went back to the other room after his brief dance before the video, he hung upside down again, lifeless and alone. How curious it is that such an image can make people feel not only sadness for what man has wrought but also, in its beauty, a kind of hope.
Photograph by Ben Nicholas.
