Transformations: BODYART's "Maison"

A column exploring the barriers between the “real” and the “created” worlds of performing arts.

by

In the email I received from Maison Producer Megan Lewicki the day before the performance, it was suggested that I wear “something that caters to your adventurous spirit” and comfortable shoes. A few hours before showtime, performer Polanco Jones Jr. met me for coffee, offering only tantalizing intimations of what I might expect: “We will be your tour guides through a palette of whimsy,” he said. “You’ll enter our world, if you’re willing.”

He promised the night would be “a decadent box of chocolates.”

The venue for Maison, the first installation of BODYART’s site-specific performance series, was a historic home in New Orleans’ Broadmoor neighborhood. I was guided toward the right house by music that floated down from about six feet above my head; a girl, dressed head to toe in white, straddled the elbow of a massive oak and played a dissonant and jaunty melody on violin. I passed off my coat and purse, told that my hands would need to be free. As soon as they were, I was presented with a generous glass of champagne and told not to let go.

A stream of elaborately costumed hosts wandered into the yard, the tiny woman in the tea dress assigned to me. Her name was Caroline. She smiled and handed me what appeared to a baby bird’s nest, a delicate arrangement of dried noodles cupping a deviled quail egg. In the corner of my eye I saw Polanco, his and his assigned guest’s ears pressed against the oak, listening. Caroline asked me my name, and then—“So Jordan, tell me. Have you ever been madly in love?”

BODYART in New Orleans

“I’ve had this idea for a decade,” said Leslie Scott, BODYART’s artistic director, when we met the next afternoon. “New Orleans is really the only place I’ve ever lived that I feel like I finally have all the pieces to pull it off.”

With a background focused in the intersections of dance and technology, Scott founded BODYART in 2006 in New York City. Since then, the multimedia contemporary dance company has performed in venues and events across the world, from Edinburgh’s Festival Fringe to Ailey Citigroup Theater, Wave Rising, and the Downtown Dance Festival in New York City. Scott’s interests in video and design inherently lead her to direct projects in nontraditional performance spaces, which have become somewhat of a trademark for BODYART’s work.   

“We will be your tour guides through a palette of whimsy,” he said. “You’ll enter our world, if you’re willing.”—Polanco Jones, Jr. 

In addition to her passion for and storied background in dance, Scott bears ten years of experience in the culinary industry working as a sommelier. “It was one of those things that started off as a day job in New York while I was running my company in the mornings, but spiraled into something I really came to love,” she said. “I wanted a way bring these two things more fully together—to bring taste and smell into the experience of dance performance.”

In 2017, Scott accepted a position as Assistant Professor of Dance at Tulane University, and moved the company to the Crescent City. In November 2018, BODYART debuted in New Orleans with hymn + them, a contemporary dance performance held at Hotel Peter & Paul, which was recently nominated Gambit’s 2019 Tribute to the Classical Arts Award for Outstanding Presentation.

For Maison, Scott enlisted an assembly of New Orleans musicians, vocalists, and performers, an award-winning theatre designer (Hannah Lax), and three other female choreographers (Michaela Cannon, Darci Jens Fulcher, and Monica Payne)—as well as a few long-time BODYART collaborators—including a chef (Cristina Mocodeau)—from Los Angeles and New York, who happily made the trip to New Orleans for the show. 

“There are definitely people doing the work here,” said Scott. “It’s a smaller community than other places I’ve lived, but I just continue to be blown away by the number of artists doing really innovative, interesting things. I feel like people who choose to make New Orleans their home are really open to collaboration and new ideas, open to storytelling in a way that’s so, so beautiful.”

Dreamstate

My experience of Maison was, as Polanco had promised, like venturing into another world—a trip, a trance. Once the door to the home was opened, it would have been easy to forget that I wasn’t at any old dinner party—the house was pristine, a clean and eclectic merging of old New Orleans with mid-century modern cool (a hanging plant growing wild, vines sprawling spiderweb-like across the window; a stack of books in the fireplace; abstract art on every wall). Nothing was particularly unusual, until my guide—this one a gentlemanly fellow donning all-black and suspenders—reached into a plant and produced a cone of rock shrimp in aioli, before smiling and gesturing for me to make my way into the courtyard, where the dream began.

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I watched—mesmerized—with a group of five other guests, as a trio of “crane dancers” flitted and flew, folded and unfolded across the courtyard bricks, tip-toeing precariously with, beside, and against each other along the edges of the swimming pool, which seemed to bubble over with enormous, cloud-like white balloons. Whisked back into the house, we were invited by a woman in red to sit at a dining room table, to nibble at plates of beet and goat cheese napoleon. “I’ll join you,” she said. And stood on her hands so she could place her feet upon the other end of the table. She then performed a passionate and technically complicated tabletop solo, inviting us to get closer all the while. She sat down at a piano, joined by one of the crane dancers, directing each of us guests to plunk a key along with them—to join in on the music, the performance.

The boundaries between my role as audience member and social participant blurred—an effect undoubtedly enhanced by the attendant wine bearers trailing our group from room to room. House, stage, dinner party, performance, dancer, friend. Lines fading and disappearing all the while.

Led deeper into the house, which now grew dark, we were squeezed into the hallway by the staircase, where Caroline and Polanco pressed themselves against the walls, listening for some unheard message. Together they climbed and fell down and dragged themselves back up the stairs in an intimate and agonized sort of minuet. We then moved to the sunroom and each received a profiterole stuffed with liver mousse. There Caroline proceeded to curl into the fetal position—a tiny girl-bird in a literal nest. Polanco lay behind her, distressed, until she started to quietly sing. He then stood up, circled the nest, again and again, faster, faster, faster, until he burst—through the doors into the courtyard, and into brilliant, explosive song.

Heightened Self

Before any performance, Polanco begins his transition to performer by adding color to his hair, bringing it to just the right shade of purple. Then he’ll examine his extensive cologne collection: “So tonight, what scents do I want to smell like? What is my character’s scent?”

For Polanco, the line between person and performer has always been thin. He describes himself as an “actor, choreographer, director, producer, songwriter person.” A student of NOCCA with a degree in Musical Theatre Performance and Dance from NSU, he’s currently involved in productions at Tulane University, the Contemporary Arts Center, Le Petit Theatre, NOCCA, and the Jefferson Performing Arts Center. Last November, he produced his first full-length work, an immersive dance art exhibition celebrating black culture called FEAST.

There is a transition, he said— not from “normal-self” to “character-self,” but from “self-in-the-world” to ‘heightened self.” “I never lose this person I am in performance,” he said. “He’s everywhere I am.

House, stage, dinner party, performance, dancer, friend. Lines fading and disappearing all the while.

“That transition makes it okay for me to live my life and celebrate myself in the way I want. It makes it okay for me to move. It makes it okay for me to be perfectly still. It makes it okay for me to be watched. Be a little weird, be a little strange, live in this world of whimsy, but it still ties into reality. Shifting into performance gives me the freedom to be who I am in that.”

But in Maison, he said, the shift was even more intense. “This work wasn’t dreamt and then put on us,” he said of the choreography. “This work was created on us. For us, for this house. It can’t exist anywhere else for anywhere else.”  He said that the interactivity of it all, the coordination of so many disparate, yet connected phrases, adds an aspect of dependence to the experience. Part of his pre-performance routine for every show he’s ever been in is simply to walk. “I want the stage to feel like my home, I need to really embody the environment,” he said. “But in this show, my walking pattern is a routine of greeting every single person there, checking on them. It makes it feel more like a house.”

Dinner Time

In a whirlwind of movement and song and food and wine, I eventually found myself sitting at a long dining table in the courtyard, beautifully set and adorned above in tea lights and tiny origami paper cranes, a plate of steaming food held by a dancer above my head. In a grand flourish twelve plates hit the table simultaneously, the dancers flitting back into the house as if they were never there. Left mostly alone for a moment, we guests tentatively whispered about the rabbit hole we had found ourselves in, feasting on steamed fish in herbs all the while.

“It’s all part of the house, all part of the house’s hospitality,” Scott told me later. “This piece is about welcoming people in, but taking them to another world, but also making sure that they’re happy and safe and fed.”

At the dinner table, I soon discovered I was sitting across from the owners of the home. Curious, I asked them how much the design team had gone in and changed their house for the performance. “Not really very much at all,” one of them replied. “That’s all our stuff.”

“A couple of lights, fabric in the tree, some lamps outside, balloons in the pool,” said Scott later of the home’s transition from house to “stage.” “The biggest transformation is probably the energy in the space, the audiences.”

[Read this: Southern Rep's new space has a sacred past.] 

The idea of site-specific performance is that a work is built, as Polanco described it, on the site itself. “The work itself and the way you made it has to live here,” said Scott. A series of performances within private homes felt, for Scott, like an ode to the overwhelming and distinct hospitality she has felt since she has come to New Orleans. “The openness and willingness of people to share their houses with me and teach me about this town is just beautiful, and it made me think, ‘What does intimacy look like?’

“We all have different lives when we close the front door, so how do you share that, or not share that, or reveal, or conceal that. It’s just something really really rich in the space of the home. So to preserve that, the house itself really had less of a transformation than the performers do throughout the day.”

The Moth

After dinner, up the stairs we wandered, into the bedroom where three performers and a violinist presented a skit of comic intimacy, of jumping across and over the bed, dancing with the ceiling fan, moody sighs, and even a hair dryer. At the end of it, each guest was offered a pillow, invited to stick their hand into a hole cut out of the middle and to take whatever they found inside. Boxes of bon bons, as Polanco had promised.

Wandering back down the stairs, we were guided to stop and sit where we were, on the steps. From a nook halfway up the stairway, a woman stood, hands tied to each side of the windowsill with white fabric; the same material covered her entire face. The man in black returned, slowly walking down the stairs, watching her, “the white moth.” Using her winglike bonds as security, she’d tilt her body, falling into an impossible angle down the stairs—appearing as though she’d crumble upon us at any moment, and then he’d pull her back to him. We were then instructed to make our way down the rest of the stairs, and into the living room. The “moth” and her partner followed, performing an evocative and acrobatic duet—climbing on top of the furniture, in and out of the windows, before joining together in the center of the room for a series of impossibly graceful poses moving fluidly one into another.

Dual Worlds

“I love performance days,” Sohalia Houssain, the moth, told me the next day, as she prepared for Maison's Friday performance. “I’m a super ritualizing person. I love crafting and creating opportunities to transform, and shifting to other areas of our consciousness.”

A professional dancer and healer, Houssain moved to New Orleans in November 2018 after years performing and teaching in cities around the country. “For a long time there were these two parts of me, the healing aspect and the performing aspect,” she said. “But I feel like since I’ve gotten to New Orleans, they’ve started to meld together.”

For Houssain, the shift from person to performer is an explicit one. “When I perform, I’m usually so immersed in what I’m doing, I often don’t even remember what happened when I’m in it.”   

In preparing for the transformation, she said she takes the time to nurture herself—eat well, get good sleep. “But then halfway through the day, I’ll start listening to inspiring music, will start moving and stretching in my space, getting my makeup on and all the little things I’m gonna need, and stepping into the role,” she said. “Even just walking down the street, really feeling that character and that energy. I kind of prepare myself to enter a dream, make sure my body is solid and centered and that I can trust it, because I kind of just put it out there to take me through whatever is happening.”

Maison, though, is a little different. “I’ve never been a part of anything quite like this before,” she said. “It’s interesting having that barrier broken with the audience, creates a very improvisational spirit and a free, kind of dreamy energy. I become kind of lucid when I’m performing and actually remember, ‘Oh, I’m in this world, but I’m in that world too.”

Window into another World

Before the end of the dinner party, we were directed to the bar in the courtyard, upon which the red lady sat. She mimed, swooped, and served us the final bites of the night: watermelon and cucumber canapés. Past her, across the fence and in the neighbor’s house, I saw the silhouette of a tiny girl watching in wonder—a fantasy, but not, playing right outside her window.

Learn more about BODYART at bodyartdance.com or their Facebook page, @BODYARTdanCo.