When Is an Act Not an Act?
Vision Shifts
The Village Voice, April 18, 2000

Scott Heron begins his P.S. 122 program with a mesmerizing interpretation of Deborah Hay’s 1995 “Exit”. To the famous adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, he crosses the room. Slowly. Gazing at his destination, turning to stare at where he’s come from. The movement is minimal. He extends his arms without seeming to reach, as if he were sensing what’s happening inside them. When he’s gone, you feel maybe the journey has worked a miracle.

Heron’s own works have no such single-mindedness. “The Water” is like an aborted tour through one of those moist, short-story Southern towns where everyone’s an eccentric. One side of the area is cluttered, sunless: the rug, the old red lamps, the brocade-covered platforms, the bouquets, David Herrigel’s rosy lighting. You can hardly see composer-bassoonist Leslie Ross. Queen of this domain is DD Dorvillier, whose head pops out of a box. She tries to remember the alphabet, tells a tale, looks disapproving. But se also clucks like a hen, and fresh streams run on four monitors. In one of Ross’s sound installations, water and pennies drip from suspended ice.

The opposite side of this three-ring circus is a white-curtained semicircle where Cathy Weis, in a checkered outfit, and Heron, bare legged, booted, and wearing a scraggly wig do a desultory country dance; later a grave and focused little girl in a boy’s suit (Zane Frazer) dances with a woman in a sparkly white dress (Cydney Pullman); later still, Jennifer Monson and Dorvillier, in white Grecian tunics, evoke post-Isadora amateur gambols.

On a central trapeze, a cop (Tanya Gagne) gradually strips during her feats. Heron walks on a slack rope, with a nose mike conveying the rasp of his breathing. While Weis sings in country-nasal style, Frazer--garbed in black boots and a white party dress--plays violin. Pullman shakes maracas, Ross provides unholy din, and Dorvillier’s head emits a boing! Whenever an accent is needed.

This is not a show in which you wonder why, say, Monson and Dorvillier form a knot and put on black socks. The principal unifying motif among the myriad visions is a gunshot. Curiously, despite all the enthralling stuff going on, I still expect something to happen that never does--maybe because almost everything is a fragment, as if these acts had been rejected from some cosmic show and condemned to float around eternity.

—DEBORAH JOWITT