'two' Good

There is good deal that is personal and deeply resonant behind longing two, the intriguing and unusually conceived new work by Donna Uchizono that has its premiere next week.

The most evidently striking aspect of her concept is that the work’s two halves will be performed in separate venues with bus transportation provided in between, and the bus ride as part of the event. (After starting at the Baryshnikov Arts Center’s Howard Gilman Space, the work concludes at The Kitchen, which is the commissioning organization.) As she spoke recently about the work’s two-year evolution, Uchizono, a Bessie Award-winning choreographer who is marking her company’s 20th anniversary, was often pensive, occasionally giddy, as she grasped for the right words and metaphors to reveal how diverse—and often difficult—events and circumstances have shaped its final form.

“It’s so far from the original concept,” she acknowledges right away, recalling how she was originally struck with the impetus to create a work in which the audience’s location and perspective were changed midway. “I had been involved in trying to adopt a young girl from Nepal. They require you to take these courses to prepare you as best they can—courses about identity and the loss of identity, in terms of where you’re born, versus where you end up. These ideas really influenced me in terms of thinking about identities and how that gets shaped by the location of where you are. During those classes, I thought: this is what artists do all the time. We’re constantly re-creating identities. Most of us were not born into an artist’s life. So I took those ideas and abstracted them. Even though it was coming out of these classes I was taking for adoption, it became more about proximity and distance, travel and journey. So I had this idea of how the location changes a piece.”

During the work’s early stages of development, Uchizono and her dancers were working in a very small, narrow studio that was their home base for a while. “It was beautiful in a really quaint way. When you work in this small little studio, it’s like the dancers are right on top of you. So when this first started, I thought I would like people to experience this proximity. There was something very beautiful about how close people were. People in an audience never really get to experience that proximity. There’s always this fourth wall, even when there isn’t a proscenium arch. When the dancers get close, you pull in, because you want to be out of their way, and want to create this wall. Everyone has a certain spatial boundary.”

In the work’s first half, at BAC, the performance space is configured to that intimate, narrow area, and the audience will be seated on two sides. Uchizono has devised a way to maintain that proximity without violating the audience’s space—a thin paper barrier in front of the seats, which also means that it is mainly the dancers’ upper-body movements that will be visible. “That completely makes you feel protected; there’s this ‘wall,’ and you don’t feel so encroached-upon, having to pull in your space,” she says.

Uchizono herself is performing in longing two, after not performing for the past decade. Joining her are Hristoula Harakas, Anna Carapetyan and Savina Theodorou, with the latter two being the primary dancers in the first half, while Uchizono and Harakas are more dominant in the Kitchen half of the work. She describes that section as “very detailed, and it’s really minimal and small. The duet with Hristoula became really personal. It was really about being able to persevere and go forward.”

Speaking of Harakas, a downtown-dance luminary who is a veteran of Uchizono’s work, the choreographer says, “Hristoula has an incredible need for rigor and detail. She really forces me to step up to the plate in that area. The things that I have her do, not that many dancers can do technically. What her body can do is quite outrageous.”

It was Harakas who encouraged Uchizono to return to performing, and the 20th anniversary seemed an appropriate occasion to do so. “It was either now or never,” she says with a big laugh. “I’m really much more interested in making dances than performing them.”

Donna Uchizono

June 1-5, Baryshnikov Arts Center, 450 W. 37 St. (betw. 9th & 10th Aves.), 212-868-4444; 7, $20. Performance continues at The Kitchen, 512 W. 19 St., bus transportation provided.