MANHATTAN 1811 GRID /FOURTEENTH STREET

Manhattan's Grid plan has been both celebrated and critiqued. The relentless mercantile repetition of predictable blocks to enable commerce, real estate efficiency, and utilitarian urban planning has had its adherents and detractors. The idea of the Grid has been a space of both avant garde experimentation as Rosalind Krauss has observed in her writings, and a place of limitation in its rigid spatialization. The grid, Krauss points out, is a space of immeasurable experimentation within its codified vectors. This space of delirium, Rem Koolhaas demonstrates, is the space of an infinite possibility of verticalities.

On 1811, a group of city planners laid forth a utopian project, an artificial environment mapped onto an undulating terrain of forests, streams, farmland- a dream scape of wood, brick, and eventually steel and concrete. In 2011, Harmattan Theater probes the originary site of Manhattan's Grid space, 14th Street, as a conflicted space of both utopian efficiency and discontinuous sensations. Fourteenth Street is a place of perpetual interruptions - a theater of deferred arrivals. Harmattan's GRID SCENES captures an hour of this spatial improvisation in its stylistically slowed down state- a somnambulist's Fourteenth Street where a large group of people barely move at all, traverse a diagonal trajectory. For Harmattan, this space of the urban grid is a performance space of repetitions, of duration, of daily detours. It is a place of return and reinvention, as people commute day in and day out on the same routes, stopping at the same points of encounter, reenacting familiar rituals of transit. This repetition is the space of the grid's improvisations with its infinitely varied gestures.

1811 GRID, GRID SCENES and FOURTEENTH STREET

Harmattan Theater's Grid Scenes emerged from an interest in the peculiar ecology of Fourteenth Street in Manhattan. Fourteenth Street is the first crosstown artery where the 1811 Grid began. It is also a cross street that connects the Hudson River to the East River downtown. Fourteenth Street is a changing barometer of New York City's mercantile and transportation landscapes. Depending on the time of day or night, the street has a distinctive sensation from block to block. The flaneur, the stranger and the immigrant all find their way to Fourteenth Street in their discovery of New York. What Fourteenth Street does not invite is a moment of quietitude from which to view the street. Fourteenth Street is a place of perpetual movement, of transit and transitoriness.

The performance GRID SCENES experiments with stillness on Fourteenth Street drawing on Architects Brian McGrath and Jean Gardner's idea of Cinematrics and Jean Luc Godard's notion of a city in motion viewed through panning, tracking and hand held camera shots. GRID SCENES is a choreography of transit - at once slowed down movement and frenetic activity.

HARMATTAN THEATER, 1811 GRID PERFORMANCE

A city has a biological life, Le Corbusier once noted. What is the future of the Grid in Manhattan's imagination? The grid as organizing logic of New York's street flows has influenced how urban movement has been imagined in the modern city. People walk swiftly up Avenues and purposefully across Streets in Manhattan, driven by the linearity of the Grid. Simple lines of transit have opened up dense networks of communicative possibilities. North/South vectors of speed in New York City have replaced older East/West networks of transportation connecting the Hudson River to the East River during the Nineteenth century maritime boom.

Corbusier's "maritime sky of Manhattan" is a reminder of the verticality of the Grid's visual impact. Corbu was moved by the soaring vistas of skyline that arrested the visual plane as one looked uptown towards the modernist horizon of disappearing sky- an impressive man made tableau. Drawing upon Corbu's observation that people traversing a Cartesian city plan may still look up and dream beautiful images, Harmattan Theater investigates what makes dense cities like New York distinctive biological environments.

Through the performance GRID SCENES, a network of sixty people traversing through Fourteenth Street and Sixth Avenue at Twilight on April 3, holding lamps made from recycled fruit boxes fitted with miniature flashlights, and Nepalese Singing Bowls, Harmattan Theater marks the slowing down of time and the expanding of space as a sensuous experience of the Manhattan Grid. The city drifts by as bodies slow down to imperceptible gestures, a flow of sensation.

GRID SCENES, 14th Street, Manhattan, April 3, 2011, 7-8pm

This year marks the 200 year anniversary of the creation of Manhattan as a rationalist space organized along a Grid of Avenues and Streets. The New York City Commissioners Map of 1811 projected a new kind of city locatable along a modernist axis both familiar in its classical orientation of the Grid and entirely new in its ruthless submission to taming nature in the interest of urban planning.

The Grid is a pragmatic yet trance inducing idea, at once mathematically beautiful and confounding. Harmattan Theater takes this dual principle of the Grid as a departure for an investigation into corporeality and spatiality through movement. Using the North/South Axis along the site of the Manhattan Grid's originating site, Fourteenth Street, Harmattan Theater is staging a performance about the slowing of time and the expansion of space within the limit of the foot stride, the block, the street, and the grid's horizontal and vertical coordinates.