Midnight Ride-Around

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.