CURRENT

CURRENT, a performance by visual artist Bill Botzow, dancers Meg Cottam and Michelle Distel, and musician/composer Jay Knapp, is a working examination of the way people work. Two of the four artists are a recently married couple: the two others are friends, both married, one pregnant throughout the process. They vary in age from mid-20's to mid-40's. As director of No.B.I.A.S. (North Bennington Independent Artists' Space) in Vermont, the gallery where Current was performed, located directly above their rehearsal space, I had the unique opportunity to observe the group's process. The four artists began by agreeing on a format in which to work. They decided to meet twice a week: the dancers danced, the musician improvised on the saxophone, the visual artist did action drawings (my term) on large pieces of paper. He did one each session. All drawings made during the rehearsals/performances were present at the sessions, the new drawing added to the grouping each time. These drawings become a symbol of their work together, the only tangible artifacts of the sessions. Their accumulation represented time, work and progress.

The process was one of, what I call, knowledgeable interaction. Each time, they got together and played, like a jazz group might. However, it was not what I would call strictly improvisational-they talked too much for that, reflecting and shaping as they went along. The challenging part for all of them was the collaboration. It was a collaboration in an unusual sense because, although they interacted, the emphasis was on their individual activities, which combined, filled, and created spaces. They worked with no other scores than the agreement of times to meet, and the environment created by Bill's large sectional drawings. These drawings later became part of his installation of drawing, painting and sculpture that occupied the gallery as an autonomous exhibition and created the physical and visual staging for the performances.

The artists' various life-styles also dictated the work in terms of their differing schedules and obligations outside the work. They come into conflict regarding the working process fairly regularly, which was as fruitful for and telling about their project as anything else. For me, their project was a humanistic one of how people work and live together.

Their endeavor became symbolic of trying to posit an autonomous individual in a cohesive society. In the end, their efforts proved successful in terms of progressing their individual aesthetic languages and creating a group dynamic where the whole was greater than the sum of its parts. The stronger their personal languages and idioms became, the stronger the group performance became, illustrating an interesting paradigm.

It was also a kind of dramatugical metaphor ("all the world's a stage"), in which the performers played the roles of themselves. This was valuable to the artist' understanding of themselves and interesting to the audience in its theatrical presentation of the artists as themselves: it struck a funny chord. Current is an innovative kind of theater, which for me evokes, among other notions, the realization that we play so many concurrent roles in our lives (workers, bosses, mothers, lovers, spouses, civic members, and guardians) that all we have to do to observe theater is become conscious of ourselves and the people we live and work with.

For the artists, Current was partially a study of organic movement - of change. This work-in-progress will always be such; its structure provides it with no place to land, like our lives.

-Andrew Cohen
gallery director