Visual Art

Midnight Ride-Around

Susie Lee, Hidden Cameras, and a Drunken Rickshaw Driver in the Rain

by Jen Graves

Keeara Rhoades

SUSIE LEE The director.

It was the middle of the night last Tuesday. A hidden camera communicating with a computer was directing the way two artists drew digital lines of projected light onto the body of a dancer as she moved. She responded to the lines as if they were lovers, but sometimes they also looked like zips of energy coming from inside her. She tried escaping them, she tried holding on to them—she failed at both. Over the course of 47 minutes, they tore her down, elated her, remade her.

At the very same time, two and a half miles away, a man stood on a ladder and wrote every word of a haunting Haruki Murakami novel on the exterior of a box truck in deep blue ink. He took the novel down by hand as a cigarette-voiced woman inside the truck, seated on a couch, read it out loud over a microphone. Another artist next to her punched the words into a typewriter, whose quick dtch-dtch-dtch-zing! was audible across the dirty urban park, bouncing against mature trees and sidewalks and the luggage of homeless men. One drunken rickshaw driver danced. Two sisters who'd lost any other way to make a living ran an elephant-ear stand next to the truck. Murakami's words hung in the air, read slowly, as if there were poetic breaks in the lines of prose:

This man

A refined piece of bad news

Now hovering

Over her

Had materialized out of nowhere.

Susie Lee was the cause of these events—the trigger for all the chain reactions conjuring up these worlds within worlds. An artist who began her career making sculpture and video caught in a kiss with each other—she graduated from the University of Washington with an MFA in 2006 and had her first solo show at Lawrimore Project in 2007—she has spent the last year pursuing entanglements outside studio confines.

"In your studio, you have an idea and it's like, 'I'm brilliant! This is great!'" she says. "But of course it's brilliant; there's nobody there to tell you otherwise."

To create For These Unclosings, the digital-­drawing/dance performance continuing this weekend at the tiny New City Theater, Lee began with a simple idea: What if her projections landed on the body rather than inanimate objects? Plenty of artists, notably Robert Campbell in Seattle, have combined video and dance. But Lee wanted something more. She wanted both the dance and the projections to happen live. "I wanted nothing recorded, nothing preestablished," she says. Even the choreography—by dancer Ying Zhou—is partly improvised every time the show is run, although the complex production, also including an original score by vocalist/accordionist Emily Greenleaf, has been in rehearsals for nine months, with Lee directing everything from the concepts to the lighting cues.

No technology existed for what Lee wanted—artists drawing "directly" on a dancer's body by seeing and responding to it on a screen that both captures movements in real time and instantly layers images onto them onstage. So she found a Microsoft programmer named Andy Wilson, and Wilson invented software just for this performance. It's called Video Draw and, in For These Unclosings, involves two computer stations (occupied by artists Reina Solunaya and Keeara Rhoades, armed with digital pencils complete with digital erasers) hidden behind a curtain like magical Etch-A-Sketches run by Wizards of Oz. For a moment you wonder how it works, but then you forget and the technology ceases to be a distraction: What matters throughout the four movements of the action is that the artists and the dancer, each with her own agenda, are struggling to connect. It's a marriage of independents under continuous construction. The misses make the connections direly touching.

By midnight, the words buzzing on the sides of the box truck parked in Occidental Square are too thick to say anything: The artist NKO has been writing them on top of each other for almost 12 hours. He hopes that eventually, when the truck (owned by a friend) gets driven around in the rain, the words might reveal themselves in layers, all over the city. The novel in question is Murakami's A Wild Sheep Chase, and because it is 300 pages and the artists are halfway through their scheduled 24-hour endurance event but only 50 pages in, they are wishing they'd chosen the shorter The Elephant Vanishes. As they start Chapter 8, which involves a woman with perfectly formed earlobes, the rickshaw driver runs up to the stage and yells, "How do! You're writing a book that's already a book?" This is the most charming, least assaultive thing he says, coming unintentionally close to what the artists want to do: set up a private living room in a public park that sends us self-consciously back into the private relationship we each have with every work of art. Since the author's version is not the reader's version, and no two readers' versions are the same, it's a wonder how much we want to read the same books and sit in a park or a theater or a gallery together and experience things. But we do.

Lee and landscape architect Elizabeth A. Umbanhowar curated this performance—enlisting, then unleashing, the team of NKO, dk pan, and Holly Brown. It's part of a series sponsored by Seattle Parks and Recreation (in an increased effort, thankfully, to present public art in Seattle that's ephemeral). "We didn't just want to do entertainment," Lee says, which is what the parks department wanted. Lee and Umbanhowar put together a slew of performances by various artists, all centered on Murakami and taking place at Occidental Square through October. The idea is inspired; Occidental and Murakami go together. Both are sad and raw and sort of unreal with history.

Even under the maple trees it is raining now, which adds a light new noise to the typewriter, slow words, and street cleaner. "I'll be back tomorrow," Lee tells NKO, then turns away. She said the same thing before she left the theater.