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Capacitor: Making the Scene (cont.)
Dance Magazine
theaters. The idea is to attract people who wouldn't ordinarily attend a dance
performance. Though they don't have hard numbers, Bernstein said that the
company regularlyreceives email from people who come to the theater after
seeing the performance in a club-and vice-versa.
Although performances outside the theater have increased the company's exposure
to the public, they've also drawn viewers who, at best, weren't planning to
see dance and, at worst, are inclined to offer the kind of noisy assessment
that the decorum of the theater generally prevents. "I don't know what
the hell they're doing!" bellowed a drunken reveler to his friends above
the din of house music at Townsend, where Capacitor performed between DJ sets.
The company posted that appearance on the Squid List, a local service that
emails event news to subscribers-some, like computer programmer Geoff Pawlicki,
came to see the show after receiving the Squid List announcement and then
linking to the company's Web site. Though some club-goers didn't understand
what was happening and others didn't notice ("You got a new haircut!"
exclaimed one friend to another as Capacitor spun gamely just out of view.
"Looks good!"), those who did stop dancing long enough to watch
seemed favorably disposed. "This is so cool," squealed an enthusiastic
watcher. "Look at it!"
Lomask doesn't necessarily mind if some folks tune out the performance. Working
that way, she said, "makes us better performers. There's something exciting
about the challenge of getting an audience's attention, having to compete
with so many other stimulants. We have to be super-committed to what we're
doing. By the time we get to the theater, we know we're not wasting anyone's
time-- if it wasn't communicating, it gets cut." As a street performer,
Bernstein got used to the idea that people could, at any minute, walk away--
and, he said, "I like the freedom of that." On the other hand, he
said, the experience underscored the importance of keeping things moving.
And it germinated his interest in what he calls "crossing communities-seeing
things from different perspectives. I like the idea of not creating art for
a particular audience."
