Twice As Nice

Art Bridgman and Myrna Packer may be the only dancers listed in the program for their Double Expose, but theirs is far more than a duet performance, thanks to the imaginative and exploratory video imagery they incorporate into the piece. Venturing further in a direction that has proven most inspirational and fruitful for them since 2003, they have collaborated again with video artist Peter Bobrow to explore ideas about identity, intimacy and reality versus illusion.

Partners offstage as well as on, Bridgman and Packer have been collaborating as dancer-choreographers since 1978. Both are lean and long-limbed and radiate fresh openness undercut by hints of the offbeat and surprising. He could be the dance world’s version of the actor Jeff Daniels—rangy, wholesome and Midwestern in his appearance. With her auburn pre-Raphaelite hair and legs for days, Packer can veer from sunny to sultry. They have been consistently productive mainstays of the city’s dance scene for decades, but the direction in which they began going eight years ago opened new paths that they continue to explore with rich results.

“Since we’ve gotten into this video work, it’s been like an explosion for us,” Packer said during a recent rehearsal break from their technical residency at the Baryshnikov Arts Center, where Double Expose is having its world premiere. (Bridgman remained in the studio, which was filled with monitors, projectors and cables, busily fine-tuning a section of the piece.) “We’ve been working with certain themes over the years—relationship, identity—and when we hit on working with our own video image, there was the metaphor right in front of us: being able to fracture into different sides of ourselves, to confront ourselves and then each other.” In the trilogy of works they have made using this process, they have cultivated a flair for ingenious, often mind-bending stage pictures in which it becomes hard to decipher the live performer from the multiple, inventively projected images. Reviewing one of those works, a local dance critic referred to the “dazzling virtual rush hour” the two performers created on stage.

“We’re working not only in the flesh and blood with each other, but with each other’s images as well,” Packer continued. “You never really know when you’re relating to the person in your mind that you’re imagining, or you’re dreaming of, or you’re remembering. I think if there’s one framework for all this work, it’s ‘What is reality?’ I think this work questions that. But it doesn’t answer it! We play with what is real and what isn’t.

“The departure for this new piece is that in two of the sections, we’re working with full cinema. We did on-site shoots—so that it’s not only images of us, but within an environment. We filmed ourselves in the locations, and then we placed ourselves in the scenes in various ways.”

For Double Expose, in addition to further expanding the possibilities they and Bobrow have developed for layering, overlapping and morphing projected images with their actual figures on stage, Bridgman and Packer are specifically referencing cinematic archetypes. “We transform into various characters that all have some reference to cinema. I think that all of us who’ve grown up with cinema have absorbed those images into ourselves,” Packer said. “There are characters and scenes in films that we either really identify with, or we dream of being. All those images resonate, somehow, in who we are in the Jungian sense that we all have these various archetypes inside ourselves.”

Among the scenes within the 45-minute work is one in which they take on the personas, and perform within the moody lighting, of film noir. “It’s not about specific films, specific actors and actresses or specific characters, but it’s genre. We’re taking our ongoing exploration about our multiple selves—and multiple sides of ourselves—a step further, in that we’re transforming into these various characters. We introduce each set of characters in their own sections, and then they all start mixing and matching, rolling in and out of bed with each other, multiplying, They meld into us and out of us.”

When one suggests that the recent direction of their work must have involved a great deal of high-tech self-education, Packer described herself as “technologically challenged,” and said Bridgman is the more advanced in terms of technology. “When we bring Peter in, that is when things really take off. He brings such skill and expertise, his talent and vision. It’s a really fabulous collaboration with him.”

>Double Expose

Through March 28, Howard Gilman Performance Space at Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37th St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-868-4444; $20.