photo by Julieta Cervantes

Vanishing Point

"Vanishing Point” uses the white columns of St. Mark’s Church to stage a funeral... Musings on mortality and heritage, inappropriate revelations, repeated runs smack into the altar wall, and dance segments that are touching and deep... add up to a vague sense of Faulknerian doom, set to good music."
__________________________________– The New Yorker

Video:

__"the dance equivalent of a peaceful, ruminative discussion with a few close
__friends, drinks in hand" – Roslyn Sulcas, The New York Times

Project Description:

As part of the City/Dans series, Danspace Project presented the premiere of Tom Pearson and Zach Morris’ evening-length contemporary dance work, Vanishing Point. Wickedly funny and suddenly somber, Vanishing Point fuses aggressive, exhaustive movement, meditative nuance, and live music by the alt-bluegrass ensemble The Dang-it Bobbys, led by composer Kris Bauman. The work was presented in a three night engagement June 26th through 28th, 2008 at St. Mark's Church in the Bowery. The show garnered two 2008 New York Dance and Performance (Bessie) Awards, one for composer Kris Bauman and one for choreographers Tom Pearson and Zach Morris.

Vanishing Point engages St. Mark’s Church both as a sanctuary and an architectural structure evocative of the columns and porticos of the rural south. Fully self-aware and handled with equal measures of sincerity and irreverence, the performance unfolds as a fictional funeral (replete with inappropriate eulogies and talk about sex in church). Ricocheting backward and forward through time in a non-linear, photo album fashion, Vanishing Point shotguns from elusive impression to indelible imprint, skips decades, unearths fragments of a hidden past, and obsessively replays events in an attempt to articulate meaning out of fractured moments.

Culled from the artists’ collective stories, Vanishing Point is an exploration of family legacies that have been shrouded in secrets, blurred by liquor, or -- in some cases -- composed of outright lies. A confluence of slipping memories, improbable tales, and faulty recollections, the work lives in the blurry spaces between truth and fabrication.

Composer Kris Bauman brings his experience as an accomplished jazz performer to bear on the score, merging elements of the blues, folk, and alt-country into a frequently raucous and sometimes moody soundscape. From knee-slappin’ drinking songs to stark, brooding deconstructions of bluegrass forms, the music slides, tumbles, and thrashes, evoking summertime porches, barroom waltzes, and better times.

For the New York production, collaborative artists and performers include Donna Ahmadi, Zach Morris, Marissa Nielsen-Pincus,Tom Pearson, Tara O’Con, and Jennine Willet. Costumes are designed by Karen Young and lighting design is by Carol Mullins.The Dang-It Bobbys, led by Kris Bauman, features Andy Cotton and Bryn Roberts.

Photo Slideshow:

photos by Tom Brazil & Julieta Cervantes; photos of TRP at the 2008 Bessie Awards by Eva Yaa Asantewaa