Arm Yourself

It was once the mess hall where militiamen who trained at the vast Park Avenue Armory took their meals. But for the past 18 months, the expansive, wood-paneled third-floor room of the armory has been the artistic home base for Brennan Gerard and Ryan Kelly, co-founders of Moving Theater. They have been pioneers of a sort, entering a room that had been shut for years (“there was literally dust on the keyhole,” Kelly recalls) as recipients of the Armory’s first space grant. They were given free range to explore, create, and also share the space with other artists.

Along the way, the pair staged a January 2009 APAP presentation in their space, and steeped themselves in the history of the Armory and the period when it was built. During a recent interview in the former mess hall—with a side door opened to reveal a view of snowy rooftops and Park Avenue—Kelly provided intriguing details about the original impetus and personalities behind the armory (which opened in 1881) and its evolution through the decades. He also discussed the development of Armory Show, the two-night performance event he and Gerard are offering as a culmination of, and salute to, their meaningful and fruitful residency.

In their APAP presentation, Last Dance, “we were really pressing ourselves not to respond to the space, in neither a formal nor conceptual way. The inverse is what we’re doing with Armory Show; where we are very much thinking about our relation to the space, the relations that exist in the space and historical relations that have existed here. It’s really a gift to the Armory, in return for the generosity they have shown us, and the time to incubate ourselves as artists.”

The multi-disciplinary work will take place in a series of the main floor’s elegantly designed 19th-century period rooms that are a lesser-known feature of the Armory, where the huge Drill Hall is the most often-used public space. Armory Show features seven performers, including Kelly, and six musicians. Moving Theater has had an ongoing collaboration with ICE/International Contemporary Ensemble, and three of its affiliated composers, Nathan Davis, Mario Diaz de León and Yu Dun, will create and perform original scores. “We worked very closely with each of them to create a piece of music specifically for these spaces, talking to them about our ideas, the themes, and relaying to them the history of the space,” Kelly explains.

Gerard, whose background is in theater (including a stint as an assistant director at the Paris Opera) and Kelly, who danced with New York City Ballet from 1998 to 2002, are wary of cultural labels when it comes to Moving Theater. “There is a very multi-disciplinary aspect to the work. We’re talking in many languages,” Kelly says. “We’re working cinematically and choreographically and musically; and we’re working with text and language. We feel strongly that the performing arts are too focused on disciplinary specificity. We might work with more of a choreographic language this time—or less, with more text that we appropriate from the world, or write ourselves.”

Does Kelly, who performed in recent years with Karole Armitage, identify himself as a dancer these days? “No—though I dance, I identify as an artist.” He proudly cites the extremely varied backgrounds of the Armory Show cast, which includes two French performers with international theater experience; a Juilliard-trained dancer; a LaGuardia High School dance student whom they met because his mother is a security guard at the Armory; and a woman who resides in the homeless shelter that occupies the Armory’s third floor. “They’re all coming from very different places, which is great. It seemed meaningful, because the Armory is a place that historically was one of exclusion. So to work with people who are coming from different places seems like the proper response to that history.”

If Kelly has traveled a long way from the New York City Ballet mindset, the two years he and Gerard spent in Europe played a major role in his esthetic journey. He spent that time “not taking a ballet class. I worked in Germany and Amsterdam. It was great because we got to see all this excellent work that never gets seen here. It was really eye-opening.”

The adventurousness they encountered on that sojourn clearly expanded their own sense of performance and it possibilities. They are certainly not timid about attempting to explore and express a great deal within Armory Show. “The medium of this work is memory. What do you remember? What do you forget? What are the memories of this space? What are the politics of those memories? Who’s remembered, and who’s not remembered? What events are forgotten? It’s very hard to make a work in this building’s spaces without making it about history and memory—and asking questions about the epic versus the ephemeral.”

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Armory Show

Feb. 20 & 21, Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Ave. (at E. 67 St.), [www.movingtheater.org](http://www.movingtheater.org/); 8, $25.